Clean Development as a Strategy for Global Risk Reduction
One asset class cuts seven coupled threats at once. The obstacle is not technology or cost but an appraisal system that credits a single benefit and prices none of the harm.
Building Adaptive Capacity Across the Emerging World Before 2050
Adaptive capacity is the meta-capability that decides whether a shock becomes a contained disruption or a cascading crisis. It runs on two engines — infrastructure and institutions — that must be built together.
The risks facing the emerging world are increasingly interconnected. A drought becomes a harvest failure, a price spike, a run on reserves, a migration wave, and a strain on health systems, in sequence or all at once; a pandemic becomes a supply-chain crisis, an inflation shock, and a sovereign-debt crisis across much of the developing world. When shocks transmit this way, the variable that decides a country's fate is not how many hazards it can forecast but how much adaptive capacity it holds — the standing, general ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and transform in the face of whatever arrives. This report argues that adaptive capacity, so defined, is the decisive development variable of the century to 2050, and that the emerging world holds too little of it.