Environment and Climate Change

In many urban communities in low- and middle-income countries, the start of the rainy season is not a welcome relief, but instead a source of persistent problems. Heavy rainfall, coupled with insufficient drainage and minimal urban planning results in regular, seasonal flooding of homes and businesses (Rentscheler et al. (2023)). In urban and suburban Dakar, rising floodwaters pose a multitude of challenges for people living in these areas by restricting movement, increasing the risk of disease, and causing death (C40 CFF (2021)).

While lack of policies are often considered as constraints to green growth, this project will investigate the challenges surrounding the adoption of eco-friendly construction materials in Bangladesh. Specifically, the project will focus on promoting the substitution of fired clay bricks (FCBs) with soil-stabilized blocks (SSBs) in public contracts and the construction industry as a whole.

This project consists in a field experiment with randomized allocation of air purifiers in small-scale textile firms in Bangladesh to estimate firms’ and households’ willingness to pay for air purifiers.

This project proposes a field experiment in which the researchers create variation in financial contract form and access to charging infrastructure to evaluate the barriers to electric two-wheelers adoption in Kenya.

In this proposed study, the research team focuses on small and medium enterprises in Ethiopia and investigates the effect of lifting knowledge and information barriers in increasing adoption of energy efficiency measures.

In this project, the research team proposes investigating how to shift the energy use behavior of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Tanzania by distributing affordable solar boilers and measuring their impact on charcoal consumption and its corresponding effects on deforestation and CO2 emission, PM2.5 concentration, and profitability of enterprises.

This project aims at understanding barriers to the uptake of renewable energy technologies among SMEs in Sierra Leone.

This project assesses medium-term economic impacts of improved electricity reliability by leveraging persistent discontinuities in electricity reliability across nearby areas in Kenya that are serviced by different feeder lines.