For the world’s poorest people, climate change does not announce itself in parts per million. It arrives as a ruined harvest, a flooded shopfront, and lost learning as children are kept out of school. The most consequential climate-policy question for developing economies is not only how much carbon the world emits, but how quickly people, firms, and governments can prepare for shocks, recover from them, and learn to do better next time. To ensure that a bad day, week, or season does not become a bad decade, the principal response to climate change for developing economies should be to quickly become more resilient to it.

The Policy Research Report "Rethinking Resilience: Adapting to a Changing Climate" offers a comprehensive approach to resilience through the Five I's: income, information, insurance, infrastructure, and interventions. These five ingredients—higher incomes, better facts, risk pooling, public investments, and social protection—are fundamental for turning climate change from catastrophe into manageable risk. In this session, Forhad Shilpi, World Bank Senior Economist and lead author of the report, will dive into the report's key insights and walk through this layered framework that can be used to make economies more resilient. 

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Forhad Shilpi Speaker

Senior Economist

Forhad Shilpi is a Senior Economist in the Sustainability and Infrastructure Team of the Development Research Group. Her current research focuses on the impacts of infrastructure and communication on rural-urban transformation, the role of domestic market institutions in the transmission of international price signals, and intergenerational mobility in developing countries. Her research has been published in leading development and economics journals such as Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Canadian Journal of Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics and Economic Development and Cultural Change. She holds a Ph.D. degree in economics from Johns Hopkins University, where she taught several economics courses. Prior to joining the World Bank, she worked as a research associate at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies.

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Stéphane Hallegatte Discussant

Chief Climate Economist

Stéphane Hallegatte is Chief Climate Economist at the World Bank. He joined the World Bank in 2012 after 10 years of academic research in environmental economics and climate science for Météo-France, the Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement, and Stanford University. His research interests include the economics of resilient low-emission development, the monitoring and measurement of climate policies on jobs, incomes, poverty, and quality of life; the inclusion of climate change and natural disasters in macroeconomic models and poverty assessments; and exploring the political economy of policies and their robustness to uncertainty. 

Mr. Hallegatte holds engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) and the Ecole Nationale de la Météorologie (Toulouse), a master's degree in meteorology and climatology from the Université Paul Sabatier (Toulouse) and a Ph.D in economics from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris).

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Deon Filmer Host

Director, Development Research Group

Deon Filmer is Director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank. He has previously served as Acting Research Manager in the Research Group, Co-Director of the World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, and Lead Economist in the Human Development department of the Africa Region of the World Bank. He works on issues of human capital and skills, service delivery, and the impact of policies and programs to improve human development outcomes—with research spanning the areas of education, health, social protection, and poverty and inequality. He has published widely in refereed journals, including studies of the impact of demand-side programs on schooling and learning; the roles of poverty, gender, orphanhood, and disability in explaining education inequalities; and the determinants of effective service delivery.

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Indermit Gill Host

Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics

Before starting this position on September 1, 2022, Indermit served as the World Bank’s Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, where he helped shape the Bank’s response to the extraordinary series of shocks that have hit developing economies since 2020.  Between 2016 and 2021, he was a professor of public policy at Duke University and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program.

Indermit has published extensively on key policy issues facing developing countries—among other things, sovereign debt vulnerabilities, green growth and natural-resource wealth, labor markets, and poverty and inequality. Indermit has also taught at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

The Policy Research Talks showcase the latest findings of the World Bank’s Research Group, challenge and contribute to the institution’s intellectual climate, and re-examine conventional wisdom in current development theories and practice.

 

These talks facilitate a dialogue between researchers and operational staff and inform World Bank operations both globally and within partner countries.

 

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