2023

Scaling Cleaner Brick Manufacturing in Bangladesh

Researchers:
Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Path-to-scale project
The approximately 7,000 brick kilns in Bangladesh generate 11% of the country’s particulate matter, 22% of black carbon, and 17% of total annual CO2 emissions. The researchers developed an intervention, Zigzag 2.0, which offered brick kiln owners and operators...

Learning about Preferences for Clean Air

Researchers:
Location:
Indonesia
Type:
  • Pilot project
Despite the enormous health costs of air pollution, willingness-to-pay (WTP) for clean air in highly polluted low-income contexts remains very low. Researchers posit that one significant and understudied reason is that clean air is an experienced good, whose...

2022

Improved Early Action through Precise Targeting, Timely Cash, and Early Warning to Mitigate the Impacts of Climate Shocks

Researchers:
Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Full project
The project evaluates a targeted risk-informed early action pilot in response to floods in Bangladesh, testing efficacy of early warning messaging, timing of cash transfers, and data-driven innovations in targeting approaches. Through a randomized evaluation...

Can Natural Reforestation be Boosted by Formalizing Customary Land Rights? Evidence from Niger

Researchers:
  • Jules Bayala
  • Arnaud Dakpogan
  • Karl Hughes
  • Ibrahim Ouattara
  • Hamed Constatin Tchibozo
  • Leigh Anne Winowiecki
Location:
Niger
Type:
  • Full project
The lack of participative forest regulation and inclusive forest governance have been disincentives for the adoption of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) for natural reforestation. There is currently missing evidence on how FMNR and the role of land...

Use of Air Purifiers in Households in Dhaka

Researchers:
  • Teevrat Garg
  • Maulik Jagnani
  • Martin Mattsson
Location:
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Type:
  • Pilot project
Air pollution is one of the most serious threats to human well-being globally and especially in urban South Asia. As air pollution levels are still rising in many cities, it is important to understand what defensive investments households can make in order to...

Climate, Yield, and Welfare Impacts of Green Super Rice

Researchers:
  • Jauhar Ali
  • Jesusa Beltran
  • Zachary Brown
  • Roderick Rejesus
  • Jose Yorobe
Location:
Philippines
Type:
  • Pilot project
Green Super Rice has the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rice cultivation, but reaching its effectiveness depends on farmer behavior and the incentives they face. In this pilot study in the Philippines, researchers will develop...

Migration as Climate Change Adaptation

Researchers:
Location:
Mexico, United States of America
Type:
  • Pilot project
Migration may be an important component of climate change adaptation, especially for residents of low-income countries. Individuals may migrate away as a coping mechanism in response to unforeseen and sudden environmental shocks, such as droughts, floods, or...

Using Behavioral Insights to Increase Energy Demand Flexibility in High-Emitting Countries

Researchers:
Location:
Ireland, United Kingdom, Canada, United States of America
Type:
  • Path-to-scale project
The objective of this project is to scale and test behavioral interventions that improve household-level demand flexibility in several high-income and high-emission countries. A secondary project objective is to reduce overall household energy demand. More...

Barriers to Public Action for Clean Air

Researchers:
  • Patrick Baylis
  • Teevrat Garg
Location:
India
Type:
  • Pilot project
Air pollution represents one of the most severe contemporary public health disasters in India. However, there remains a notable absence of public pressure on elected officials to seek policy solutions to improve air quality. In this study, researchers will...

Air Filters and Students Learning

Researchers:
Location:
Colombia
Type:
  • Full project
This project aims to evaluate whether installing air filters inside classrooms enhances student learning. Bogotá has high levels of air pollution which could negatively affect education. Installing air filters (HEPA) could potentially mitigate the harmful...

2021

The Value of Forecasts

Researchers:
  • Fiona Burlig
  • Amir Jina
  • Erin Kelley
  • Gregory Lane
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
Climate change will dramatically alter weather patterns around the world, particularly in developing countries. Farmers in poor countries are currently unable to optimally adapt to the weather. Under climate change, yields are projected to fall substantially...

Play for the Mangroves

Researchers:
Location:
Dominican Republic
Type:
  • Pilot project
The most important environmental issue facing the Dominican Republic (DR) today is the destruction of its coastal mangrove forests. These trees save lives by shielding villages from tropical storm damage, providing a haven for juvenile reef fish, and...

Housing Microfinance for Climate Resilience in the Philippines

Researchers:
Location:
Philippines
Type:
  • Pilot project
Low-income households in the Philippines lack sufficient access to affordable and resilient housing to protect them from the physical and economic damages brought by increasingly frequent extreme weather events, such as typhoons and floods. Researchers will...

Mobilizing Political Action on Climate Change

Researchers:
  • Lucy Page
  • Hannah Ruebeck
Location:
United States of America
Type:
  • Full project
Averting the worst impacts of climate change requires immediate government action in wealthy, high-emitting countries like the United States. Today, these policy changes are no longer limited by technical know-how, but rather by a lack of political will. This...

Using Contests to Deliver Cost-Effective Energy Conservation in Vietnam

Researchers:
  • Teevrat Garg
  • Jorge Lemus
  • Guillermo Marshall
  • Chi Ta
Location:
Vietnam
Type:
  • Pilot project
The energy sector in low- and middle-income countries is characterized by two stylized facts: first, high rates of particulate and carbon emissions per unit electricity generated, and second low electricity reliability. To reduce air pollution levels and...

Impacts of Small-Scale Biogas Technology on Energy Access in Egypt

Researchers:
  • Samer Atallah
  • Olivier Deschênes
  • Ahmed Elsayed
  • Nico Pestel
  • Marc Witte
Location:
Egypt
Type:
  • Pilot project
Across low- and middle-income countries, cooking fuel expenditures represent a large share of households’ budgets, crowding out health and educational expenditures. Simultaneously, many rural areas lack the infrastructure to deal with agricultural waste...

Increasing Adoption of Rooftop Solar in Bangalore

Researchers:
  • Teevrat Garg
  • Meera Mahadevan
Location:
India
Type:
  • Pilot project
India’s increasing prominence in the global economy has been accompanied by hazardous air pollution levels, in part due to the dominance of coal-based power generation. To reduce air pollution levels and increase energy production, the national government has...

Driving Greener Mobility

Researchers:
  • Robert Pickmans
  • Hilary Yu
Location:
Rwanda
Type:
  • Pilot project
Motorcycle taxis provide an important means of transportation and support economic livelihoods across Latin America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, existing moto-taxis are largely petrol-based, with significant negative externalities for both...

2020

Forest Conservation on a Budget: Redesigning Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico to Increase Cost-effectiveness

Researchers:
Location:
Mexico
Type:
  • Path-to-scale project
Mexico’s national forest protection program, Pago por Servicios Ambientales (PSA), is one of the largest Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs worldwide, but its funding has declined sharply recently. This project aims to study whether the program’s...

Improved Environmental Inspections in China and Their Effects

Researchers:
  • Douglas Almond
  • Shuang Zhang
Location:
China
Type:
  • Full project
China’s poor environmental performance is not for lack of issuing environmental regulations. Instead, there is a persistent gap between what the central government requires and what local governments implement (Karplus, Zhang, and Almond, 2018). In 2019-2021...

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Shipping Industry

Researchers:
Location:
United States of America
Type:
  • Pilot project
Shipping produces significant greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) along with other harmful pollutants that result in premature deaths and reduce ecosystem services. Based on our analysis of data with the shipping company Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, we have...

Experimental Evaluation of a Flood Forecasting Tool

Researchers:
Location:
Bihar and Assam, India
Type:
  • Full project
Between 2011-20, floods caused over 45,000 deaths with most occurring in lower-income countries (Guha-Sapir, 2020). Early warning systems (EWS) for floods can lower human and economic losses and improve post-flood recovery. But, underdeveloped dissemination...

How Do Managers’ Beliefs about New Technologies Evolve? Informational Interventions and the Adoption of Energy-efficient Stitching Motors in Bangladesh

Researchers:
  • Ritam Chaurey
  • Yunfan Gu
  • Gaurav Nayyar
  • Siddharth Sharma
Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Full project
This project will conduct a randomized control trial on the determinants of adoption of an energy-efficient technology in the Bangladeshi manufacturing sector. The technology is a new motor for stitching machines, called a “servo” motor, which uses about 75%...

Piloting PROEZA

Researchers:
  • Silvio Daidone
  • Esther Heesemann
  • Martin Prowse
  • Jyotsna Puri
  • Nicholas Sitko
Location:
Paraguay
Type:
  • Pilot project
The government of Paraguay and FAO Paraguay will implement a large-scale conditional cash transfer program for smallholder farmers in the Eastern part of Paraguay, as part of the “Poverty, Reforestation, Energy and Climate Change Project” (PROEZA). The cash...

Adoption and Use of Smart Plugs for Demand Side Management in India

Researchers:
  • Teevrat Garg
  • Greer Gosnell
  • Zeynep Gurguc
  • Ralf Martin
Location:
Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, India
Type:
  • Pilot project
India is plagued with the twin problems of exceedingly high levels of air pollution and low access to electricity. To address these issues, India plans to dramatically scale electricity capacity in conventional and renewable resources. To fully harness the...

Page Content