| Summary: | This report explores how public policy can change to better help people cope with new or worsened risks, how land and water management must adapt to better protect a threatened natural environment while feeding an expanding and more prosperous population, and how energy systems will need to be transformed. The authors examine how to integrate development realities into climate policy - in international agreements, in instruments to generate carbon finance, and in steps to promote innovation and the diffusion of new technologies. The report is an urgent call for action, both for developing countries that strive to ensure policies are adapted to the realities and dangers of a hotter planet, and for high-income countries that need to undertake ambitious mitigation while supporting developing countries' efforts.
"Places do well when they promote transformations along the dimensions of economic geography: higher densities as cities grow; shorter distances as workers and businesses migrate closer to density; and fewer divisions as nations lower their economic borders and enter world markets to take advantage of scale and trade in specialized products. World Development Report 2009 concludes that the transformations along these three dimensions - density, distance, and division - are essential for development and should be encouraged." "This report has a different message: economic growth will be unbalanced. To try to spread it out is to discourage it - to fight prosperity, not poverty. But development can still be inclusive, even for people who start their lives distant from dense economic activity. For growth to be rapid and shared, governments must promote economic integration, the pivotal concept, as this report argues, in the policy debates on urbanization, territorial development, and regional integration. Instead, all three debates overemphasize place-based interventions." "Reshaping Economic Geography reframes these debates to include all the instruments of integration - spatially blind institutions, spatially connective infrastructure, and spatially targeted interventions. By calibrating the blend of these instruments, today's developers can reshape their economic geography. If they do this well, their growth will still be unbalanced, but their development will be inclusive."--Jacket
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