ECOWAS's infrastructure : a regional perspective

Infrastructure improvements boosted growth in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) by one percentage point per capita per year during 1995-2005, primarily thanks to growth in information and communication technology. Deficient power infrastructure held growth back by 0.1 percent. Raising the region's infrastructure to the level of Mauritius could boost growth by 5 percentage points. Overall, infrastructure in the 15 ECOWAS countries ranks consistently behind southern Africa across many indicators. However, there is parity in access to household services -- water, sanitation, and power. ECOWAS has a well-developed regional road network, though sea corridors and ports need attention. Surface transport is expensive and slow, owing to cartelization, restrictive regulations, and delays. There is no regional rail network. Air transport has improved despite the lack of a strong hub-and-spoke structure. Safety remains a concern. Electrical power, the most expensive and least reliable in Africa, reaches 50 percent of the population but meets just 30 percent of demand. Regional power trading would bring substantial benefits if Guinea could become a hydropower exporter. Prices for critical ICT services are relatively high. Recent panregional initiatives have improved roaming. New projects are underway to provide access and improved services to unconnected countries. Completing and maintaining ECOWAS's infrastructure will require sustained spending of $1.5 billion annually for a decade, with one-third going to power. Although the necessary spending is only 1 percent of regional GDP, some countries'share is between 5 and 25 percent of national GDP. Clearly, external assistance will be needed.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Airports and Air Services,Infrastructure Economics,Transport and Trade Logistics,Roads&Highways

Natural capital accounting and the measurement of sustainability

This thesis contributes to the field of sustainable development by investigating complementary approaches to measuring the wealth of nations. The research adopts the ‘capitals theory’ of sustainability, which defines sustainability in terms of non-declining living standards and provides a clear wealth management rule: endowing future generations with the potential to be ‘at least as well off as the present’ requires that comprehensive wealth is non-declining over time. Focusing on the natural capital component of comprehensive wealth, the thesis explores how individual countries might account for resource depletion against the backdrop of rising international trade, the presence of transborder externalities, and the development of international environmental policies. Recalling of Boulding’s notion of ‘Spaceship Earth’ the thesis investigates the implications of accounting for natural capital depletion within national borders (the production-based perspective) versus adopting a more global consumption-based perspective that attributes wealth depletions along a supply chain to the country of final consumption. A 57-sector, 140-region multi-regional input-output model measures natural capital depletions from both the production and consumption perspectives, covering oil, coal, natural gas, minerals, ocean (fisheries), and forest (timber) natural capital depletions. The next paper expands the analysis to produce a new accounting perspective that incorporates carbon emissions as wealth depletions according to the damages they cause rather than the location of emissions. The discussion notes that each perspective entails policy ‘blind spots’ but that together they provide new insight into the measurement of national and global sustainability. The final paper links the thesis directly to global sustainability policy by investigating the extent to which measured progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals represents a genuinely new direction for the international development community

Africa Capacity Indicators 2012: Capacity Development for Agricultural Transformation and Food Security

A core message in the report is that improving the productivity and the economic returns of agriculture has immediate effects on poverty and hunger in at least three important ways: a) it increases the productivity and incomes of the majority of Africa’s poor, who work primarily in agriculture; b) it reduces food prices, which affect real incomes and poverty in urban areas; and, c) it generates important spillovers to the rest of the economy. Yet, countries need capacities of all kinds to make these productivity improvements and secure the required economic returns. Overall, as judged at the ACI composite index level, whereas in 2011 there wasn’t a single country that classified in the “High” category of capacity, in 2012 one country (Ghana) improved by barely sliding into that Level. Also, there are notable improvements in “Development results at country level”, where the percentage of countries in the lowest levels (Low and very Low) decreased from 61.7% to 19%. The majority shifted from “Low” to “Medium” Level and one can observe a country (Ghana) in the “Very High” level. With this Report, ACBF hopes to bring political, policy, research, investment, and capacity development attention to the implementation, monitoring, and tracking issues holding back the transformation of African agriculture and the guaranteeing of food security for its growing and youthful population. Done right, agriculture can indeed transform Africa. But it needs to start by using agriculture to transform the structure of Africa's economies

Identifying indicators of sustainable development using the global sustainability quadrant approach

Advances in information technology and global data availability have opened the door for assessments of sustainable development at a truly macro scale. It is now fairly easy to conduct a study of sustainability using the entire planet as the unit of analysis; this is precisely what this work set out to accomplish. The study began by examining some of the best known composite indicator frameworks developed to measure sustainability at the country level today. Most of these were found to value human development factors and a clean local environment, but to gravely overlook consumption of (remote) resources in relation to nature’s capacity to renew them, a basic requirement for a sustainable state. Thus, a new measuring standard is proposed, based on the Global Sustainability Quadrant approach. In a two‐dimensional plot of nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) vs. their Ecological Footprint (EF) per capita, the Sustainability Quadrant is defined by the area where both dimensions satisfy the minimum conditions of sustainable development: an HDI score above 0.8 (considered ‘high’ human development), and an EF below the fair Earth‐share of 2.063 global hectares per person. After developing methods to identify those countries that are closest to the Quadrant in the present‐day and, most importantly, those that are moving towards it over time, the study tackled the question: what indicators of performance set these countries apart? To answer this, an analysis of raw data, covering a wide array of environmental, social, economic, and governance performance metrics, was undertaken. The analysis used country rank lists for each individual metric and compared them, using the Pearson Product Moment Correlation function, to the rank lists generated by the proximity/movement relative to the Quadrant measuring methods. The analysis yielded a list of metrics which are, with a high degree of statistical significance, associated with proximity to – and movement towards – the Quadrant; most notably: Favorable for sustainable development: use of contraception, high life expectancy, high literacy rate, and urbanization. Unfavorable for sustainable development: high GDP per capita, high language diversity, high energy consumption, and high meat consumption. A momentary gain, but a burden in the long‐run: high carbon footprint and debt. These results could serve as a solid stepping stone for the development of more reliable composite index frameworks for assessing countries’ sustainability

Waste Crime – Waste Risks: Gaps in Meeting the Global Waste Challenge

More than ever, our future depends upon how we manage the future of our waste. As an integrated part of sustainable development, effective waste management can reduce our global footprint. Ignoring or neglecting the challenges of waste, however, can lead to significant health, environmental and economic consequences. A staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food is produced each year to feed the world’s 7 billion people. Yet, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), around US$1 trillion of that food goes to waste. With 200,000 new peoplWaste covers a very wide spectrum of discarded materials ranging from municipal, electrical and electronic, industrial and agricultural, to new types including counterfeit pesticides. It also includes anything in size and scale from decommissioned ships, oil or liquid wastes, hundreds of millions of mobile phones to billions of used car tires. __Recommendations__ - Strengthen awareness, monitoring and information - Strengthen national legislation and enforcement capacities - Strengthen international treaties and compliance measures - Promote prevention measures and synergie

The role of livestock in food security, poverty reduction and wealth creation in West Africa

Peer reviewe

A framework for overall sustainability assessment of local small-scale energy production - demonstration of an approach

201

New and enhanced policy measures for the sustainable use of natural resources in agriculture and forestry

201

SUSTAINABLE FUTURES IN A CHANGING CLIMATE : Proceedings of the Conference “Sustainable Futures in a Changing Climate”, 11–12 June 2014, Helsinki, Finland

How does climate change influence our understanding of the future? How can we contribute to creating desirable but possible futures in the era of climate change? The Finland Futures Research Centre’s 16th Annual International Conference ‘Sustainable Futures in a Changing Climate’ focused on presenting current future-oriented research on different aspects of climate change, and thus, the conference contributed to the global field of knowledge sharing concerning climate change. This conference gathered together 140 participants from 21 different countries. During the two days, altogether 67 presentations were held in 11 thematic working groups dealing with various topics. This conference proceedings collects some of the full conference papers presented in the thematic working groups. The articles in this publication are divided to chapters according to the themes of the working groups. Each article in this conference proceedings has gone through a peer review process. We thank all the authors of the articles and the anonymous referees for their valuable contribution to this publication