The causes of global warming and its consequences are clear, and the economic impacts of climate change are apparent. Climate change threatens development gains. Extreme weather events have brought severe droughts to Central Asia, heat waves and forest fires to the Russian Federation, and floods to Southeastern Europe. Unchecked emissions will result in rising economic costs and increasing risks to individuals. There is a clear case for all of the world's economies to move to a low-carbon growth path. Yet climate action has been inadequate, especially in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region. With prospects of a global climate agreement uncertain, Growing Green: The Economic Benefits of Climate Action identifies the actions that governments in the region can take to reduce the carbon footprints of their economies. Many of these actions will more than pay for themselves, and quickly-especially when indirect benefits such as better health and increased competitiveness are considered. To realize these benefits, policy makers in ECA need to move quickly on three sets of priorities: use energy much more efficiently; gradually move to cleaner energy sources; and increase carbon capture in soils and forests. These actions will require transformations in power generation, industrial production, mobility, city living, and farming and forestry. Policy makers are justifiably worried that climate action may jeopardize economic performance and strain the budgets of poorer families. Growing Green: The Economic Benefits of Climate Action shows how well-designed growth and social policies can make climate action growth-enhancing while protecting the living standards of less well-off households. The ECA region has been a bystander on climate action, and sluggish in realizing the benefits of the economic and technological innovations available to combat climate change. Growing Green: The Economic Benefits of Climate Action aims to help ECA become a leader in confronting this challenge. In doing so, it shows how countries in the region can make climate action-along with economic growth and social inclusion-the third pillar of their development strategies. Growing Green: The Economic Benefits of Climate Action is a part of a series of three regional reports that includes Balancing Act: Cutting Energy Subsidies While Protecting Affordability and Energy Efficiency: Lessons Learned from Success Stories. These reports will be of interest to policy makers, government officials in finance and line ministries, nongovernmental organizations, and development practitioners.

This report responds to pressing questions for policymakers in Eurasian cities and national governments. Faced with changing economic circumstances and a reorientation of trade toward Europe and Asia, will Eurasia's cities be able to adjust? Will some cities be granted the flexible regulations and supportive policies necessary for growth? And will some be permitted to shrink and their people assisted in finding prosperity elsewhere in the region? Even as Eurasian cities diverge, they face shared challenges. Policymakers have a key role in assisting spatial restructuring, particularly in addressing imperfect information and coordination failures. They can do so by rethinking cities, better planning them, better connecting them, greening them and finding new ways to finance these changes. Eurasian cities will also have to find the right balance between markets and institutions to become sustainable. As the World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography illustrates, Eurasia (excluding Russia) is a 3D region- a region with low density, long distance, and many divisions. Securing accessibility to leading regional markets such as China, India, and Russia is thus critical. This will require key institutions to be developed to unite the countries, key connective infrastructures to be established between domestic and regional markets, and targeted interventions to be undertaken to compensate countries for short-term losses from this deepened economic integration. Policymakers at the highest levels in these countries should put accessibility at the top of their agendas.| Irving Babbitt was a giant of American criticism. His writings from the 1890s to the 1930s helped advance American criticism and scholarship to international esteem. More than seventy years after his death his intellectual staying power remains undiminished. On Literature, Culture, and Religion is an ideal introduction to this seminal American thinker. Babbitt's opinions were uncompromising, and his vocal allies and opponents included almost every name in American literature and scholarship: T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Paul Elmer More, H. L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis. A founder of New Humanism, Babbitt was best known for his indictment of Romanticism and his insistence that the modern age had gone wrong. Babbitt argued for a renewal of humanistic values and standards--which he found best articulated in classical Greece, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The selections cover topics central to Babbitt: criticism, Romanti-cism, classical literature, French literature, education, democracy, and Buddhism. They typify Babbitt's method: recondite allusion, penetrating insight and analysis, impeccable scholarship, and unrelenting pursuit of the furthest ramification and the profoundest implication. The original annotation is retained. Brief introductions to the essays place them in the Babbitt canon. A major introductory essay by George A. Panichas surveys Babbitt's career and critical reception and summarizes the concepts that inform Babbitt's writing. Panichas raises again controversial issues that were not really resolved in Babbitt's time. The essay will challenge those long familiar with Babbitt and New Humanism and those newly introduced thereto. George A. Panichas is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland and editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review. He is the author of Adventure in Consciousness: The Meaning of D. H. Lawrence's Religious Quest, Dostoevsky's Spiritual Art: The Burden of Vision (available from Transaction), The Reverent Discipline: Essays in Literary Criticism and Culture, and The Courage of Judgment: Essays in Criticism, Culture, and Society.

These case studies complement the earlier ground breaking work of ""Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis"" published in April 2005. Three case studies address specific hazards: landslides, storm surges and drought. An additional, three case studies address regional multi-hazard situations in Sri Lanka, the Tana River basin in Kenya, and the city of Caracas, Venezuela.