This book presents new research related to climate change policies and effects. It discusses the implications of climate change on issues pertaining to international relations and economic development, and the question of how climate change could jeopardize the international system as we have known it until today. It aims to provide an empirical basis and epistemological framework to discuss the effects of climate change on economic growth, social development and welfare as a global phenomenon influenced by policies carried out transnationally and by national governments. Case studies from around the globe are presented.

Climate change (CC) is currently an unquestionable phenomenon. If not stopped, it will be catastrophic for life on earth. Scientific evidence shows that human activities are the primary driver of CC tendencies since the industrial times. In this book, we present the relationship between development and CC, with special reference to agriculture, the rural sector, and policies aimed to promote sustainable development. We also give special attention to the situation in low- and medium-income countries particularly rural households and small farmers in these countries.The study of agriculture, CC, and sustainability requires consideration of natural resources and their uses (land, freshwater, forests, etc.), as well as the rural sector since land for agricultural production often expands at the expense of forests. In addition, the use of water for agricultural production affects the availability of this resource for other uses in the urban, industrial, and service sectors. Consequently, sustainable agricultural development under CC requires an interdisciplinary or at least a multidisciplinary approach. In this book, we do our best to deal with this challenge by focusing on issues and topics related to agriculture and its use of natural resources in the context of CC, but without ignoring the interrelations of these phenomena with further aspects of sustainability beyond agriculture.

The impacts of climate change on economic development have the potential to be unevenly distributed around the globe. This book focuses on South East Asia with respect to the economics of climate change and the relationship between climate change and economic development. The book examines the region's vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, forecasts the environmental and economic outcomes for the region arising from its vulnerability and also the opportunities these factors provide for policy actions towards alleviating climate change vulnerability, particularly through adaptation.

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 computer revolution both in the hardware as well as in software has made it possible for economists to analyze complex issues which could not be solved in the past by analytical methods. A large library of numerical techniques are now available to economists for solving models ranging from a simple system of linear simultaneous equations to large non-linear dynamic optimization models. We attempt to take advantage of these advancements in computational economics to address the issue of global warming and economic development. The use of computer simulation models has enhanced the understanding of some of the underlying issues in the global warming literature which would have been impossible without these models. However, to date, the global warming issue has been addressed in a partial equilibrium framework. In other words, the climate scientists tend to specify economic variables as exogenous variables in their global warming models while the economists do the same by specifying the climate variables as exogenous variables in their global warming models. Both approaches ignore important feedback relationships which will be triggered when either economic or climate variables are perturbed. The ideal model structure would be one in which both systems are incorporated within one framework with emphasis on the long run effects of greenhouse gas curbing policies and the corresponding effect on the economic growth potential of the economies.

Amsalu Woldie Yalew attempts to address the direct and indirect economic effects of climate change, adaptation costs, and adaptation finance in developing countries with emphasis to Ethiopia using a static computable general equilibrium (CGE) model coupled with a regional module. The results show that the economy-wide effects of climate change are profound. Planned public adaptation that aims to fully neutralize climate change-induced agricultural productivity shocks may help to avert the aggregate effects but with residual effects. The results also indicate that structural change underpins climate-resilient development as it contributes to dampen the adverse consequences of climate change on aggregate GDP and households’ welfare.

The papers in this special issue represent some of the most comprehensive analyses of the implications of climate change for developing countries undertaken to date. The papers employ a bottoms-up systems approach whereby the implications of climate change are evaluated using structural models of agriculture and infrastructure systems. The authors of the paper hail from multiple disciplines. This comprehensive, multi-disciplinary, structural approach is designed to allow for more robust insight into the potential implications of climate change. The approach also allows for experimentation with alternative policy options for achieving development objectives in the context of climate change.