A new study carried out by the World Bank and OECD identifies cities around the world most at risk from future damaging floods. The study, which appears in "Nature Climate Change", finds the costs of global flood damage could rise to $1 trillion a year if cities do not take steps to adapt. The authors find that because current flood defenses and urbanization patterns have been designed for past environmental conditions, even a moderate change in sea level is sufficient to make them inadequate, thus magnifying flood losses to catastrophic levels. The authors encourage early action and warn that some of the cities where flood risk will increase the most in the coming years are not the cities where the risk is particularly high today.

Researchers at the World Bank have published a new paper on "Resource discoveries, learning, and national income accounting." The paper develops a model of optimal resource extraction and discovery that combines two polar assumptions: (i) that discovering a resource today drives up the cost of future resource discoveries, and (ii) that extracting resources yields knowledge that reduces the cost of discovery. Although the model shows that resources discoveries should be valued at marginal discovery cost in measures of national savings and income, the ultimate size of the resource that can be exploited is the result of the interplay between rising discovery costs and accumulating knowledge.

This paper by the OECD Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED) Programme presents the results of a study measuring green growth in the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). The study pays particular attention to the challenges of measuring the transition to a low-carbon economy in cross-border areas as they have additional levels of complexity when it comes to measuring and monitoring their low-carbon transition.

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