Transforming Urban-Rural Water Linkages Into High-Quality Investments

Transforming Urban-Rural Water Linkages Into High-Quality Investments PDF

Author: Asian Development Bank

Publisher:

Published: 2020-08-21

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13: 9789292623319

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This publication discusses the urban-rural water linkages (URWLs) approach to restoring river health in degraded environments. It emphasizes how the approach tackles issues relevant to land use, water withdrawal, and pollution. The URWL approach can be effectively embedded into the project design to maximize the benefits of investment projects, which are aimed at restoring degraded river environment and uplifting the livelihood of the people dependent on such ecosystem. In this regard, the publication makes a case for how it can be applied generally across ADB's developing member countries.

Transforming Urban–Rural Water Linkages into High-Quality Investments

Transforming Urban–Rural Water Linkages into High-Quality Investments PDF

Author: Asian Development Bank

Publisher: Asian Development Bank

Published: 2020-08-01

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 929262332X

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This publication describes the urban–rural water linkages (URWLs) approach to restoring river health in degraded environments, such as the Tuan River in Henan Province of the People’s Republic of China. The URWLs approach tackles issues affecting urban and rural areas through a focus on land use, water withdrawal, and pollution. This publication demonstrates how this approach can be effectively embedded into the project design to maximize the benefits of investment projects, which are aimed at restoring degraded river environments and uplifting the livelihood of the people dependent on such ecosystem. It makes a case for how the approach can be applied generally across the Asian Development Bank’s developing member countries.

Rural–Urban Water Struggles

Rural–Urban Water Struggles PDF

Author: Lena Hommes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-29

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1000708535

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Rural–Urban Water Struggles compiles diverse analyses of rural–urban water connections, discourses, identities and struggles evolving in the context of urbanization around the world. Departing from an understanding of urbanization as a process of constant making and remaking of multi-scalar territorial interactions that extend beyond traditional city boundaries and that deeply reconfigure rural–urban hydrosocial territories and interlinkages, the chapters demonstrate the need to reconsider and trouble the rural–urban dichotomy. The contributors scrutinize how existing approaches for securing urban water supply – ranging from water transfers to payments for ecosystem services – all rely on a myriad of techniques: they are produced by, and embedded in, specific institutional and legal arrangements, actor alliances, discourses, interests and technologies entwining local, regional and global scales. The different chapters show the need to better understand on-the-ground realities, taking account of inequalities in water access and control, as well as representation and cultural-political recognition among rural and urban subjects. Rural–Urban Water Struggles will be of great use to scholars of water governance and justice, environmental justice and political ecology. This book was originally published as a special issue of Water International.

Africa's Pulse, No. 26, October 2022

Africa's Pulse, No. 26, October 2022 PDF

Author: Cesar Calderon

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2022-10-04

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 1464819327

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African economies are facing a series of challenges to their post-pandemic recovery. Economic activity in the region is slowing to 3.3 percent amid global headwinds, including weak global growth and tightening global financial conditions. Elevated inflation rates and resulting policy tightening, as well as the rising risk of debt distress, are also impacting economic activity. While food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa was increasing before the onset of Covid-19, the pandemic and the food and energy crisis have contributed to the recent steep increase in food insecurity and malnutrition. Climate shocks, low productivity in agriculture, lack of infrastructure also contribute to rising food insecurity in the region. The economic fallout from the multiple crises affecting the region has lowered household incomes, increased poverty, widen inequality and heightened food insecurity. This report discusses short-term measures combined with medium- to long-term policy actions that can strengthen African countries' capacity to build resilience and seize opportunities to unlock productivity-enhancing growth while protecting the poor and vulnerable.

Urban Transformations

Urban Transformations PDF

Author: Sigrun Kabisch

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-01-08

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 3319593242

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The book addresses urban transformations towards sustainability in light of challenges of global urbanization processes and the consequences of global environmental change. The aim is to show that urban transformations only succeed if both innovative scientific solutions and practice-oriented governance approaches are developed. This assumption is addressed by providing theoretical insights and empirical evidence pointing particularly at 3 concepts or qualities which are determined here as being central for achieving urban sustainability: resource efficiency, quality of life and resilience. Urban case studies from several international research projects illustrate our conceptual approach of urban transformations towards sustainable development. Thus, the book reaches far beyond a mere additive description of single case studies. It incorporates the results of condensed synthesis, resulting from comparisons and evaluations. It provides, based on cross-cutting reflection of single cases and different scales and methods of analysis, general and transferable findings. They do not only consider the scientific sphere but deliberately go beyond it discussing transferability of knowledge into practice, governance options and the feasibility of policy strategies in order to pave the way for sustainable urban transformations to happen today and in the future.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023 PDF

Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.

Published: 2023-07-12

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9251372268

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This report provides an update on global progress towards the targets of ending hunger (SDG Target 2.1) and all forms of malnutrition (SDG Target 2.2) and estimates on the number of people who are unable to afford a healthy diet. Since its 2017 edition, this report has repeatedly highlighted that the intensification and interaction of conflict, climate extremes and economic slowdowns and downturns, combined with highly unaffordable nutritious foods and growing inequality, are pushing us off track to meet the SDG 2 targets. However, other important megatrends must also be factored into the analysis to fully understand the challenges and opportunities for meeting the SDG 2 targets. One such megatrend, and the focus of this year’s report, is urbanization. New evidence shows that food purchases in some countries are no longer high only among urban households but also among rural households. Consumption of highly processed foods is also increasing in peri-urban and rural areas of some countries. These changes are affecting people’s food security and nutrition in ways that differ depending on where they live across the rural–urban continuum. This timely and relevant theme is aligned with the United Nations General Assembly-endorsed New Urban Agenda, and the report provides recommendations on the policies, investments and actions needed to address the challenges of agrifood systems transformation under urbanization and to enable opportunities for ensuring access to affordable healthy diets for everyone.

World Development Report 2008

World Development Report 2008 PDF

Author: World Bank

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2007-10-15

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780821368091

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The world's demand for food is expected to double within the next 50 years, while the natural resources that sustain agriculture will become increasingly scarce, degraded, and vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In many poor countries, agriculture accounts for at least 40 percent of GDP and 80 percent of employment. At the same time, about 70 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas and most depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. 'World Development Report 2008' seeks to assess where, when, and how agriculture can be an effective instrument for economic development, especially development that favors the poor. It examines several broad questions: How has agriculture changed in developing countries in the past 20 years? What are the important new challenges and opportunities for agriculture? Which new sources of agricultural growth can be captured cost effectively in particular in poor countries with large agricultural sectors as in Africa? How can agricultural growth be made more effective for poverty reduction? How can governments facilitate the transition of large populations out of agriculture, without simply transferring the burden of rural poverty to urban areas? How can the natural resource endowment for agriculture be protected? How can agriculture's negative environmental effects be contained? This year's report marks the 30th year the World Bank has been publishing the 'World Development Report'.

Water for Rural Communities

Water for Rural Communities PDF

Author: John Briscoe

Publisher:

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13:

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Efforts to improve the water supplies used by people in rural areas of developing countries have run into serious obstacles: not only are public funds not available to build facilities for all, but many newly constructed facilities have fallen into disrepair and disuse. Along with the numerous failures there are also successes in this sector. From these successes a new view has begun to emerge of what the guiding principles of rural water supply strategies should be. This book brings together and spells out the constituents of this emerging view. The central message is that it is the local people themselves, not those trying to help them, who have the most important role to play. The community itself must be the primary decisionmaker, the primary investor, the primary organizer, and the primary overseer. The authors examine the implications of this primary principle for the main policy issues - the level of service to be provided in different settings, the level and mechanisms for cost recovery, the roles for the private and public sectors, and the role of women. The potential advantages of proceeding from this outlook, instead of the older top-down approaches, are considerable. Improvement efforts are more likely to meet felt needs, new facilities are more likely to be kept in service, and more communities are more likely to get safe water sooner.

Urban Energy Transition

Urban Energy Transition PDF

Author: Peter Droege

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2018-08-12

Total Pages: 706

ISBN-13: 0081020759

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Urban Energy Transition, second edition, is the definitive science and practice-based compendium of energy transformations in the global urban system. This volume is a timely and rich resource for all, as citizens, companies and their communities, from remote villages to megacities and metropolitan regions, rapidly move away from fossil fuel and nuclear power, to renewable energy as civic infrastructure investment, source of revenue and prosperity, and existential resilience strategy. Covers technical, financial, systems, urban planning and design, landscape, mapping and modelling, and sociological issues related to urban renewable energy transformations Presents city-wide renewable energy strategies and urban thermal performance planning, sector coupling, and smart distributed renewable energy and storage systems Examines individual and mass transport systems in the contexts of urban mobility trends and energy innovations Explains successful innovations in solar bond finance, blockchain technology enabled peer-to-peer renewable energy trading systems, and the case for renewable energy based regional monetary systems Features foci on societal, community and user enabling aspects such as energy justice, prosperity and democracy, and urban renewable energy legislation, programs and incentives Includes analytic case insights into successful practices from around the globe that provide local, regional and country-specific governance and organizational perspectives