Zimbabwe Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR)
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CAKE TeamPublished
Abstract
The World Bank Group’s Country Climate and Development Reports (CCDRs) are a core diagnostic that integrates climate change and development. The reports suggest concrete, priority actions to support the low-carbon, resilient transition. As public documents, CCDRs aim to inform governments, citizens, the private sector and development partners and enable engagements with the development and climate agenda.
Zimbabwe is a lower middle-income country with abundant natural capital and growth potential, but is highly exposed to climate change, with its immediate ability to address climate challenges severely constrained. While Zimbabwe is rich in natural capital, both mineral and renewable, existing public sector resources to address climate change challenges are limited by weak domestic revenue mobilization and limited access to development finance due to arrears to multilateral development banks (MDBs).
Zimbabwe is at a crossroads and the path that it takes will have consequences for both its development and climate action. Key sovereign decisions on macroeconomic policy, debt, mining sector governance, agricultural policy, and social protection will either keep the country on an LMIC path or open the door to an Upper Middle-Income Country (UMIC) path.
Reflecting this path-determining decision point, this report examines two separate growth scenarios and how these will be impacted by a range of climate scenarios out to 2050. The report proposes ways that the two growth scenarios could be made greener and more resilient and ways to transition towards the aspiration scenario: (i) a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, which projects past economic trends into the future; and (ii) an aspirational (ASP) scenario, based on the full implementation of Zimbabwe’s Vision 2030.
Proposed climate actions for both the Business-As-Usual (BAU) and the Aspirational (ASP) scenarios are clustered around three key areas:
- Greening the mining industry and supporting low emissions, resilient infrastructure– creating an enabling governance environment that links revenues from mining to economy-wide green and resilient industrial and infrastructure development
- Supporting conservation agriculture, landscape restoration, food and water security – enabling millions of farmers to adapt to climate change and reduce emissions from land use change
- Protecting and growing human capital – supporting the poorest with social safety nets and basic services that equip them to cope and proactively adapt to a warming world.
Citation
Zimbabwe Country Climate and Development Report (2024). The World Bank Group.