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.

The Economics and Environment for Development Research Program (EEfD) at CATIE is leading a series of studies on decision-making under risk. We address the issue of adaptation to climate change from the perspective of how farmers’ attitudes towards risk, affect the adoption of different adaptation strategies, including crop insurance demand, and in the light of the recent coffee rust epidemic in Central America.

In many lower-income countries, the establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs) involves significant opportunity costs for artisanal fishers, reflected in changes in how they allocate their labor in response to the MPA. The resource economics literature rarely addresses such labor allocation decisions of artisanal fishers and how, in turn, these contribute to the impact of MPAs on fish stocks, yield, and income.