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August 2012

City District Shrinks Its Impact by Using Water 5 Times Over

Michael Peter Steen Jacobsen's picture

Hammerby Sjöstad, in central Stockholm, is integrated urban water management in action. The district, which was intended to be an Olympic Village, once was an old industrial area, but it has been transformed into a sustainable city.

Starting about a decade ago, the planners took on the ambitious goal of reducing the environmental footprint of the neighborhood by 50% compared to other recent developments in Stockholm. They brought in new ideas and put them into practice at surprisingly low costs.

While I was in Stockholm for World Water Week this past week, I spoke to Erik Freudenthal from GlashusEtt in Hammerby Sjöstad about the project.

Answering questions about Global Findex Database

Leora Klapper's picture

Approximately 50 percent of the global adult population - or 2.5 billion people - are excluded from the formal financial system. Who are the unbanked? The vast majority of these adults are concentrated in the developing world - only a third of South Asians, a quarter of Sub-Saharan Africans, and less than a fifth of Middle-Easterners and North Africans have an account at a formal financial institution (Demirguc-Kunt & Klapper, 2012). Why are these people unbanked? A shortage of money, excessive cost, distance to a bank, and documentation requirements are reported by the unbanked themselves as the main barriers to financial access.

Brazil’s “Beautiful Horizon” Looks to City-Wide Improvements in Energy Efficiency

Nicholas Keyes's picture

Belo Horizonte City Skyline

The city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is determined to be known for its commitment to sustainability.  In recent years, the municipal government has switched public lighting to a more efficient system, conducted a greenhouse gas inventory, and created programs for sustainable public purchasing and building certification.   The utility responsible for public cleaning services and waste treatment generates electricity using biogas from landfills.  The city prides itself on its public parks and on having twice the green area inside the municipal boundaries than is recommended by WHO guidelines. The name of the city itself means “Beautiful Horizon”. Read this post in Portuguese (Leia este post em português.)

Global Findex "Live-Chat", hosted by the "G2012 Mexico Financial Inclusion: Innovative Solutions for Unlocking Access"

Leora Klapper's picture

 Approximately 50 percent of the global adult population - or 2.5 billion people - are excluded from the formal financial system. Who are the unbanked? The vast majority of these adults are concentrated in the developing world - only a third of South Asians, a quarter of Sub-Saharan Africans, and less than a fifth of Middle-Easterners and North Africans have an account at a formal financial institution (Demirguc-Kunt & Klapper, 2012). Why are these people unbanked? A shortage of money, excessive cost, distance to a bank, and documentation requirements are reported by the unbanked themselves as the main barriers to financial access.

Is water and sanitation for all possible in Latin America and the Caribbean?

Greg Browder's picture

También disponible en español

"Water" and Latin America are inextricably linked. The region's vast expanses lose their meaning without their clear blue lakes, the roar of their waterfalls or the deep depth of their rivers. Despite these natural riches, the region faces various challenges to manage water in a way which is accessible to everyone and also contributes to improved sanitation for the population.

To find solutions to these challenges, water experts from around the world are gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, for World Water Week, the biggest annual meeting on world water issues.  For us, water and sanitation folks, this event is an important opportunity to look at how the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is doing towards meeting the water and sanitation needs of its population within the context of green and inclusive growth.

Food Prices Are Soaring: 5 Questions for Economist José Cuesta

Karin Rives's picture

Read this post in Español, Français, 中文, عربي

Rice grains in bowl. Photo: Arne Hoel | The World Bank

Photo Credit: Arne Hoel/World Bank

The numbers are jarring: Global prices for key food staples such as corn and soybean were at an all-time high in July 2012, with corn rising 25 percent and soybeans 17 percent in a single month.

Globally, food prices jumped 7 percent between April and July. In some countries, people now pay more than twice as much for sorghum [1] as they did a year earlier, the latest issue of the World Bank’s Food Price Watch shows.

This is expected to hit certain regions with high food imports, such as the Middle East and much of Africa, especially hard.

We’re looking at a significant price shock, but does that mean we’re headed for a food crisis similar to the one we experienced in 2008? World Bank economist José Cuesta, the author of the quarterly Food Price Watch report, gives his perspective on the situation.

Life in the post-transparency age

Prasanna Lal Das's picture

life-in-the-post-transparency-agIn the World Bank Finances team, we're currently asking ourselves what's next after publishing open financial data? What comes after transparency?

There's of course a lot we still need to do -- we need to help other people publish data (other people's data can make ours even more powerful and help tell more complete stories), we need to help people learn to use our data, we need to raise awareness about the availability and potential of open data, there of course is more (and more granular) data we still need to publish, and the like.

 

What a Difference Political Culture Makes

Anne-Katrin Arnold's picture

While democracy is developing and strengthening in more and more countries across the world, there may be some lessons to learn from older, established democracies. Democracy does not equal democracy – different forms and philosophical foundations shape different political cultures. Different political cultures favor different practices and outcomes. The political and civic leadership in evolving democracies may possibly have a chance to push things in one or another direction by looking at practices and outcomes in other countries.

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

Trust Law
Corruption in water sector increases hunger risk – experts

“Stamping out corruption in the water sector is crucial to boosting global food production as world population growth increases pressure on water supplies, according to experts meeting at World Water Week in Stockholm.

Corruption in the water sector is already a major problem for farmers and it’s likely to get worse as competition for water increases, a joint statement released by the Water Integrity Network (WIN), Transparency Internationaland the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) Water Governance Facility at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) said.

Governments, businesses and civil society must work together to improve transparency in the water sector, and introduce better checks and balances to counter corruption and nepotism, the statement said.”  READ MORE 

Re-thinking School Architecture in the Age of ICT

Michael Trucano's picture

in Colombia, entering a school of the past ... or the future?What will the school of the future look like?

Most likely, it will largely look like the school of today -- but that doesn't mean it should. Few will deny that it will most likely, and increasingly, contain lots of technology. Some may celebrate this fact, others may decry it, but this trend appears inexorable. To what extent will, or should, considerations around technology use influence the design of learning spaces going forward?

Of course, with the continued rise of online 'virtual' education, some schools don't (or won't) look like traditional 'schools' at all. Various types of structured or semi-structured learning already take place as part of things that we consider to be 'courses', even if sometimes such things don't conform to some traditional conceptions of what a 'course' is or should be.  The massive online open course (or MOOC) in artificial intelligence offered by Stanford has received much recent attention, but the phenomenon is not necessarily new (even if its current exemplars are marked by many characteristics that are indeed new, or much more developed, than those previously to be found in, for example, large 'distance learning' courses).

Let's leave aside the case of the 'virtual school' for a moment and assume that there will continue to be a need for a physical space at which students and educators will gather and interact. (Such places may be access points to virtual education, or featured various types of so-called 'blended learning', where face-to-face interactions are complemented by interactions in the virtual world -- or vice versa.)  Indeed, let's assume, for our purposes here, that the school as a concept will presumably be along for many decades to come, and that it will have a physical representation of some sort. What might such a school look like, especially in the era of ICTs?

Import protection update: Antidumping, safeguards, and temporary trade barriers through 2011

Is protectionism getting better or worse? Chad Bown, Senior Economist with the Trade and International Integration Team in the Development Research Group analyses recent World Bank data from 24 major economies suggesting that import protection through temporary trade barriers — such as antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing duties — has increased considerably for a handful of mostly emerging markets in the past year. But the news is not all bad – some countries have lowered their trade barriers.

No Water, No Food Security

Diego Juan Rodriguez's picture

July was the hottest month on record in the U.S. and with it the price of maize jumped 23 percent. According to very rough estimate made in a blog from the Wall Street Journal, this means just $33 more at the register next year for the average U.S. grocery shopper. But it means much more for poor people in developing countries, who already spend up to 60 percent of their income on food.

The Alchemy of Achievement: ‘Go for the Gold’ by Planning for Competitiveness

Christopher Colford's picture

Strategic planning brought the UK Olympic success. Can it also pay economic dividends? (Credit: London Annie, Flickr Creative Commons)Success doesn’t just happen automatically – not in the economy, and not in any competitive arena of life. But by focusing your resources realistically in the areas of your greatest strength, you can maximize your chances of coming out on top. Perhaps in some long-vanished world of effortless monopolies and protected markets, passivity might once have been enough – but in a world of relentless global competition, a lazy laissez-faire abdication cannot deliver optimal results.

That lesson has come through clearly amid these elegiac end-of-summer days, as the world continues to bask in the Olympic afterglow of the Summer Games in London. The games lifted the spirits of sports-watchers worldwide – and the postgame analysis of just how the host country, Great Britain, ran up its highest medal count in 104 years has provoked some intriguing ideas about creating an “Olympic effect” for economic development.


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