Natural and artificial ecosystems (such as agricultural ecosystems), confer benefits in the form of provisioning, regulatory, cultural and habitat goods and services to nations and humanity as a whole. Degradation of ecosystems through different threats and drivers compromises their ability of provide these goods and services. In Kenya, just like many African countries, climate change and variability is a driver affecting weather patterns and causing seasonal shifts.

The literature analyzing the effects of extreme weather events on social and economic outcomes has increased significantly in the last few years. Most of these analyses use either self-reported data about whether the storm affected the respondent or aggregated data such as precipitation at municipality level. We argue that these estimates might be biased due to the inclusion of households that are not directly affected but live close enough to be indirectly affected through economic or government assistance spillovers.

When designing schemes such as conditional cash transfers or payments for ecosystem services, the choice of whom to select and whom to exclude is critical. We incentivize and measure actual contributions to an environmental public good to ascertain whether being excluded from a rebate can affect contributions and, if so, whether the rationale for exclusion influences such effects. Treatments, i.e., three rules that determine who is selected and excluded, are randomly assigned.

This paper examines the impact of agriculture-related shocks on consumption patterns of rural farming households using 3 years of data from South Africa. We make two key observations.

Community-based drinking water organizations (CBDWOs) are the most important providers of water in rural areas of the developing world. They are responsible for coping with future threats due to climate change, besides other non-climatic drivers of change such as demographic growth. The inherent capacities of CBDWOs to adapt to external drivers of change would be greatly conditioned by their capacities to initiate and catalyze collective processes.

A driving restriction policy is a politically acceptable policy tool to address traffic congestion and air pollution in some countries and cities, but evidence from Beijing suggests that it is not as effective as hoped. This type of policy, called a command-and-control measure, is more acceptable than a market-based pricing instrument, because it states a rule that applies to everyone, rather than imposing a tax or fee that might be felt more heavily by poorer people. 

This paper identifies conditions under which the Clean Development Mechanism and other carbon finance projects effectively generate genuine, “additional” carbon credits—relying on a systematic empirical investigation of afforestation/reforestation and bioenergy carbon finance projects across Tanzania, Uganda, and Moldova. At low global carbon prices, additionality was related to the interests of project developers and their resulting capacities and motivations for project implementation.

The paper analyzes the economic impacts of climate change-induced fluctuations on the performance of Ethiopia's agriculture, using a countrywide computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. We model the impacts on agriculture using a Ricardian model, where current agricultural production is modelled as a function of temperature and precipitation, among other things, and where future agriculture is assumed to follow the same climate function. The effect of overall climate change is projected to be relatively benign until approximately 2030, but will become considerably worse thereafter.