New IFPRI research on rural Pakistan suggests that adverse weather shocks indeed lower the future?looking aspirations of the poor. This finding is consequential because it suggests a double burden of such shocks: they deplete the income and assets of the poor today while also contributing to lower aspirations for (and thus investments in) the future. This double burden demands a double role for resilience strategies: to restore the livelihoods of the poor today while also raising aspirations for the future. These findings are consistent with IFPRI research in rural Ethiopia on the formation and impact of aspirations. The various IFPRI studies suggest that the poor suffer from especially low aspirations, and having higher aspirations may reduce poverty and improve resilience by leading to greater productive investments.

The concept of community, in all its diverse definitions and manifestations, provides a unique approach to learn more about how groups of individuals and organizations are addressing the challenges posed by climate change. This new volume highlights specific cases of communities developing innovative approaches to climate mitigation and adaptation around the United States. Defining community more comprehensively than just spatial geography to include also communities of interest, identity and practice, this book highlights how individuals and organizations are addressing the challenges posed by climate change through more resilient social processes, government policies and sustainable practices. Through close examinations of community efforts across the United States, including agricultural stakeholder engagement and permaculture projects, coastal communities and prolonged drought areas, and university extension and local governments, this book shows the influence of building individual and institutional capacity toward addressing climate change issues at the community level. It will be useful to community development students, scholars and practitioners learning to respond to unexpected shocks and address chronic stress associated with climate change and its impacts.

Analysis of rural vulnerability to weather shocks requires an accurate exposure record. Both self-reported and weather data records have been used with potential biases. We are the first to evaluate these biases by constructing two comparable records: self-reported weather shocks from a rural household panel dataset and measured weather shocks from weather data. Despite their positive relationship and similar average welfare effects, the two records display a large discrepancy. Being endogenous, the self-reported record introduces the attenuation bias in analysing non-farm diversification in response to shocks. We suggest to instrument the self-reported shock with the measured shock for better analytical quality.

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

The positive effects of climate change on the market Record-setting snowfall, cyclones in Australia, chronic drought in Russia, and other dramatic weather events are getting increased attention from scientists and the general public. The effects of climate change present challenges to many sectors, but also present major investing opportunities in the stock, bond, and futures markets. Extreme Weather and The Financial Markets looks at climate change from an investor's standpoint. The climate change debate is somewhat irrelevant to those in the financial industry, since we already live with more than enough extreme climate events to impact the financial markets. To the extent that environmental scientists are correct and global climate change is real and getting worse, the more investment opportunities we have The book presents investment ideas that will work under today's global climate condition and will become even more lucrative if global climate change continues Written by Larry Oxley, an acclaimed author who has personally outperformed the index in the Basic Materials sectors (i.e. chemicals, metals, mining, and forest products) for each of the last five years—in both good and bad markets and throughout the global recession—in a portfolio of nearly $2 billion Focusing on the investment opportunities during dramatic weather events, Extreme Weather and The Financial Markets offers advice on how to capitalize on global climate change.

The Fund has a role to play in helping its members address those challenges of climate change for which fiscal and macroeconomic policies are an important component of the appropriate policy response. The greenhouse gas mitigation pledges submitted by over 160 countries ahead of the pivotal Climate Conference in Paris in December represent an important step by the international community towards containing the extent of global warming. Strategies for reducing emissions will reflect countries’ differing initial positions, political constraints and circumstances. Carbon pricing can, however, play a critical role in meeting in the most efficient and effective way the commitments that countries are now entering into; it can also raise substantial revenues that can be used to reduce other, more distorting taxes. Through its incentive effects, carbon pricing will also help mobilize private finance for mitigation activities and spur the innovation needed to address climate challenges. Finance ministries have a key role to play in promoting and implementing these policies and ensuring efficient use of the revenue raised. The process of climate change is set to have a significant economic impact on many countries, with a large number of lower income countries being particularly at risk. Macroeconomic policies in these countries will need to be calibrated to accommodate more frequent weather shocks, including by building policy space to respond to shocks; infrastructure will need to be upgraded to enhance economic resilience. It will be important that developing countries seeking to make these adaptations have access to sufficient financial support on generous terms. Financial markets will play an important role in helping economic agents and governments in coping with climate change-induced shocks. And heightened climate vulnerabilities and the structural adjustments associated with a shift towards a low-carbon economy over the medium-term will have important implications for financial institutions and financial stability. This paper identifies areas in which the Fund has a contribution to make in supporting its members deal with the macroeconomic challenges of climate change, consistent with national circumstances. It draws on materials contained in a forthcoming Staff Discussion Note (Farid et al. 2015) and has benefited from the discussions at informal Board meetings on IMF work on climate change held on September 30 and November 24, 2015.

Developing policies to foster inclusive rural transformation processes requires better evidence on how climate change is affecting the livelihoods and economic behaviours of vulnerable rural people, including women, youths and people living in poverty. In particular, there is little comparative, multi-country and multi-region evidence to understand how exposure to weather shocks and climate change affects the drivers of rural transformation and adaptive actions across different segments of rural societies and in different agro-ecological contexts. This evidence is essential because, while climate risk and adaptive actions are context specific and require local solutions, global evidence is important for identifying shared vulnerabilities and priority actions for scaling up effective responses. This report assembles an impressive set of data from 24 low- and middle-income countries in five world regions to measure the effects of climate change on rural women, youths and people living in poverty. It analyses socioeconomic data collected from 109 341 rural households (representing over 950 million rural people) in these 24 countries. These data are combined in both space and time with 70 years of georeferenced data on daily precipitation and temperatures. The data enable us to disentangle how different types of climate stressors affect people’s on-farm, off-farm and total incomes, labour allocations and adaptive actions, depending on their wealth, gender and age characteristics.