This report proposes a World Bank strategy for assisting the rural, environmental, and social development of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It has been produced for a general audience partly for consultation purposes, and is therefore a work in progress. Each of the three areas of development is examined in separate chapters, and each summarises the World Bank assistance strategy in that area. The conclusion is that the challenge posed by the objectives of this report are far beyond the World Bank's abilities to achieve on its own.

Despite the fact that three quarters of the world's poor live in rural areas, the level of international development aid directed at rural areas has continued to decline over the last decade, particularly in terms of the agricultural sector. In 2001, lending for agricultural projects was the lowest in the World Bank's history. This publication presents the World Bank's new rural development strategy based upon a results oriented approach which stresses practice, implementation, monitoring and empowerment aspects. The strategy seeks to highlight rural development efforts, focusing on the needs of the rural poor, fostering a broad-based economic growth and addressing the impact of global developments on client countries.

This report presents the latest updates related to food security and nutrition in Europe and Central Asia, including estimates on the cost and affordability of healthy diets. It also explores how governments are supporting the food and agriculture sector and how to repurpose policies and incentives to make healthy diets more affordable and agrifood systems more environmentally sustainable. The new estimates confirm that the prevalence of hunger at chronic or severe levels is relatively low in the ECA region, through the prevalence of food insecurity at moderate or severe levels can be quite high. The region is seeing alarmingly high – and rising – rates of overweight and obesity. The COVID-19 pandemic has added 25.5 million people in the region to the ranks of the moderately or severely food insecure, leaving them without access to safe, nutritious and adequate food. The war in Ukraine has made the situation worse. Almost all ECA subregions are experiencing increased costs and reduced affordability of healthy diets because of higher food prices and lower incomes. This report contains an in-depth analysis of the repurposing of food and agricultural policies to ensure the food systems transformation is better suited to addressing the “triple challenge” of achieving food security and good nutrition for better health, providing livelihoods to farmers and others connected to the sector, and reducing the nature and climate footprint of the sector. This report also reviews complementing policies within and outside of agrifood systems to assess whether repurposing efforts are impactful in the ECA region.

With the larger role that the agricultural sector plays in the Eastern Europe and Central Asian (ECA) region, emphasis must be placed on the sector's sustained growth and prosperity. The Bank strategy for rural development in the ECA region during the early phase of transition emphasized the reform of agricultural policies and assistance in privatizing, restructuring, and rebuilding agriculture and agro-industrial complexes. In retrospect, it can be seen that the ECA countries concerned made the right choice when they set their objective to transform their socialized agriculture into a private-ownership and market-based system. Given the developments of the past decade, it is clear, however, that the initial expectations for the outcomes of such reforms were overly optimistic. The transition process in agriculture is far more complex than originally envisaged by both the countries themselves and the international community, including the Bank. Increased social problems and alarming growth of poverty have added a new, unexpected, dimension to the transition process. As the analysis indicates, the region's rural economy is still struggling to adjust to new economic realities, and this will require further refinement and adjustment of the Bank's approach as well. This volume, based on an overview of recent regional developments, summarizes the revised World Bank assistance strategy for rural development in the ECA region.

Social Protection & Labor at the World Bank, 2000-2008 presents a progress review of the sector strategy by the World Bank, published in early 2001. The strategy proposed a new conceptual frameworkOCoSocial Risk ManagementOCoto review and reform existing interventions and propose new ones that better assist vulnerable people in addressing the many risks to which they are exposed."

This publication has the objective of providing a comprehensive analysis of the key trends in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and vulnerability to climate change in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region, compiling the most relevant efforts and progress reported by countries in the implementation of mitigation and adaptation goals and measures in recent years. Considering the areas of the FAO mandate, this document aims to provide information with relevance for the agricultural, and land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) sectors as key contributors to country gross domestic product (GDP) and one of the most vulnerable areas of economic activity to the impacts of climate change. This policy analysis report consists of three main sections that consider the levels of economic development, as well as diverse geopolitical contexts, in the region. To reflect this diversity of country realities, the information is structured and presented by sub-regions, including the Caucasus, Central Asia, (European part of) the Commonwealth of the Independent States and Ukraine 2 (hereinafter referred to as CIS), EU27+UK, 3 European Free Trade Association (EFTA), and Southeastern Europe (SEE).

This Climate Finance toolkit was prepared by the Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, jointly with the United Nations Environment Programme Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia, as part of the efforts both organizations systematically conduct to support countries to access scaled-up sources of climate finance. This document aims at compiling relevant and up to date information on different sources of climate finance, through which countries in Europe and Central Asia could identify opportunities to finance their objectives and goals defined in the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) submitted to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In this sense, it includes information on the overarching architecture for climate financing at global level and the key conceptual framework related to climate finance and provides detailed briefs for the most relevant sources of finance with operations in this region.

The farm structures in the countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are highly diverse, but in most of the countries are still largely dominated by smallholders and family farms. Supporting smallholders and family farms is one of four priorities for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Europe and Central Asia, confirmed by the FAO Regional Conference in 2018. FAO established in the region in 2014 the Regional Initiative on Empowering Smallholders and Family Farms for Improved Rural Livelihoods and Poverty Reduction (Regional Initiative 1) as a programmatic umbrella for the implementation of support to smallholders and family farms in the programme countries in the region. During 2018-2019, FAO REU conducted country studies on the needs and constraints of smallholders and family farms in eight countries of the region. Seven of these were funded from a regional project (TCP/RER/3601) and the Serbian study was financed from extra budgetary funds. The countries were selected from among those where smallholders and family farms dominate the farm structures and from the various sub-regions so that together they provide a regional overview. The countries covered in the report are Albania, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Republic of Moldova, North Macedonia, Serbia and Tajikistan. The methodology was common among the eight country studies, although with some variations from country to country due to differences in national contexts. The eight studies were elaborated by national experts supported by international consultants and FAO technical guidance. The research methodology combines the use of desk research and statistics, interviews with key stakeholders, workshops with key stakeholders and decision makers, and the use of qualitative cases.

A leading authority on Central Asia offers a sweeping review of the region's path from independence to the post-9/11 world. The first decade of Central Asian independence was disappointing for those who envisioned a straightforward transition from Soviet republics to independent states with market economies and democratic political systems. Leaders excused political failures by pointing to security risks, including the presence of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. The situation changed dramatically after 9/11, when the camps were largely destroyed and the United States introduced a military presence. More importantly the international community engaged with these states to give them a "second chance" to address social and economic problems. But neither the aid-givers nor the recipients were willing to approach problems in new ways. Now, terrorists groups are once again making their presence felt and some states may be becoming global security risks. This book explores how the region squandered its second chance and what might happen next.

This latest Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will again form the standard reference for all those concerned with climate change and its consequences, including students, researchers and policy makers in environmental science, meteorology, climatology, biology, ecology, atmospheric chemistry and environmental policy.