Adapting to Climate Change: Assessing World Bank Group Experience

Please join us for a brownbag presentation with Ken Chomitz, Senior Advisor for the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank Group.

Ken will be presenting on a recent evaluation of the Bank Group’s climate change activities, including a just-completed report on climate change adaptation, Adapting to Climate Change: Assessing World Bank Group Experience.

Climate change makes development more difficult and expensive. It has intensified familiar threats such as drought, heat waves, floods and storms, and will continue to do so. And it brings wholly new challenges, such as the loss of glacial water storage and the inundation of low-lying coasts and islands.

The World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (IEG)’s new evaluation draws lessons for climate adaptation from three kinds of World Bank Group activity. It reviews the impact of longer-standing efforts to deal with climate variability, for instance via drought relief, sustainable land management, and flood control. It looks at how, and how well, the World Bank Group has incorporated climate change risks into the design and appraisal of infrastructure. And it assesses early lessons from a new crop of activities that explicitly grapple with climate adaptation at the national level.

About the Kenneth M. Chomitz

Ken Chomitz is a Senior Advisor in the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank Group, where he has led a series of three evaluations of the Bank Group’s climate change activities including a just-completed report on climate change adaptation. He also chairs the Oversight Committee for the Independent Evaluation of the Climate Investment Funds. Previously he was a Lead Economist with the Bank’s Development Research Group.

Chomitz’s work has focused on global environmental issues. He is the author of At Loggerheads? Agricultural Expansion, Poverty Reduction and Environment in the Tropical Forests and a coauthor of the Bank’s World Development Report 2003: Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World. He has published extensively on economic issues related to deforestation, biodiversity, and climate change.

Chomitz holds a degree in mathematics from MIT and a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was a National Research Council Fellow at the US National Academy of Sciences; Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University; and Senior Advisor with the Development Studies Project, a policy research institute associated with the Indonesian National Development Planning Board.