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Governments across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) face challenges in extending and maintaining infrastructure to serve their populations, especially as climate change and ecosystem degradation endanger communities and infrastructure assets across the region. To help address these challenges, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) aims to increase its support of Nature-based Solutions (NBS) in accordance with the banks 2020 Environmental and Social Sustainability Mainstreaming Action Plan. This Issue Brief serves two main functions. First, it describes IDB's growing focus on NBS and provides a tour of IDBs main offerings regarding NBS project support and investment. Second, it serves as a baseline of IDBs activities related to NBS from which the bank and partners can build upon moving forward. Going forward, IDB will ramp up support for clients to incorporate NBS considerations and opportunity analysis in country agreements and throughout all stages of project preparation, from investment identification to execution.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) can contribute to equitable and sustainable development across Latin America and the Caribbean and represent an important investment opportunity for national and subnational governments, infrastructure service providers, development banks, and corporations. Examining the status of NBS efforts and results within the region can shed light on what is required to drive more investment towards NBS projects. To chart a pathway forward, this brief provides a regional review of NBS projects, their status, and implications for investment. These NBS projects aim to address a variety of objectives, including securing water supply, improving water quality, reducing landslide risk, and helping to manage urban flooding, river flooding, or coastal flooding and erosion. The projects utilize a broad range of types of NBS, from forest management to coral reef restoration. This brief outlines the difficulties to scaling NBS adoption in the region and identifies strategies to address the challenges moving forward.

As development financiers strive to implement climate adaptation measures that are effective and consistent with countries climate-resilient development pathways in line with the Paris Agreement, there is an urgent and increasing need to reduce vulnerability to climate variability and climate change, ensure that development operations are climate-resilient, particularly promote development operations that build climate resilience, and to monitor and evaluate the success of these measures. Given this need, the objective of this document is to provide a general conceptual framework to guide IDB project teams from different sectors in how to identify climate resilience opportunities and define indicators at the project level that will facilitate the monitoring and assessment of climate resilience results. With the conceptual framework presented in this document, the IDB aims to (1) lay the conceptual foundations to seize climate resilience opportunities in development projects by presenting definitions and examples for climate resilience elements and capacities as a basis for a conceptual climate resilience metrics framework and (2) guide sectorial specialists in identifying output and outcome indicators to monitor climate resilience results at the project level and to later evaluate the effectiveness of implemented adaptation and climate resilience activities.

This paper suggests possible evidence of climate change in Mexico at the watershed level, based solely on historical data. The official Mexican climate dataset was used to find the best set of stations for each watershed. Maximum and minimum temperatures and rainfall in ten watersheds are analyzed from 1970 to 2009. Maximum temperature trends show a significant increment in most of these watersheds. Furthermore, Daily Temperature Range (DTR) exhibits a positive trend (increments), thus implying an increase in temperature extremes. This study also shows that the difference between maximum and minimum monthly temperature trends is negatively correlated with monthly precipitation trends. As a result, land-use and land-cover changes could be the main drivers of climate change in the region.

Mesoamerica and the Caribbean are low-latitude regions at risk for the effects of climate change. Global climate models provide large-scale assessment of climate drivers, but, at a horizontal resolution of 100 km, cannot resolve the effects of topography and land use as they impact the local temperature and precipitation that are keys to climate impacts. We developed a robust dynamical downscaling strategy that used the WRF regional climate model to downscale at 4 - 12 km resolution GCM results. Model verification demonstrates the need for such resolution of topography in order to properly simulate temperatures. Precipitation is more difficult to evaluate, being highly variable in time and space. Overall, a 36 km resolution is inadequate; 12 km appears reasonable, especially in regions of low topography, but the 4 km resolution provides the best match with observations. This represents a tradeoff between model resolution and the computational effort needed to make simulations. A key goal is to provide climate change specialists in each country with the information they need to evaluate possible future climate change impacts.

Esta publicacion sintetiza el trabajo analitico desarrollado por especialistas del BID en el marco de preparacion de la nueva estrategia del Banco con Paraguay. El documento analiza los desafios que afronta Paraguay para alcanzar mayores niveles de bienestar y desarrollo, y propone opciones de politica para superarlos.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) acknowledges the challenges the region faces and is developing a set of publications, guidelines and tools to increase knowledge of the vulnerability of transport infrastructure. The objective of this document is to disseminate the methods used by IDB to develop climate change projections based on key vulnerability assessment maps for 26 countries in LAC. Realistic Greenhouse gas emissions scenarios were used to develop different sets of climate projections (precipitation, temperature and sea level rise) and their potential impact on the transport sector.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the waste sector account for only 4% of the total production, with wastewater management accounting for accurately 8 to 10% of this contribution. Wastewater disposal and treatment activities, mainly contributes to non-CO 2 gases such as methane (CH 4 ) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O). Capturing or avoiding these emissions is thus both a concern and an opportunity. The clean development mechanism (CDM) offers an instrument to internalize global climate concerns into the design of wastewater treatment facilities. Properly designed facilities could improve effluent quality and optimize the abatement of greenhouse gas emissions, thus ensuring additional revenues to pay for capital, operation and maintenance costs and possibly justify higher levels of wastewater treatment. This document summarizes the experience of the "Rio Frio CDM project" in Colombia, as an example of what is achievable through the CDM application in wastewater treatment upgrade in developing countries. This document summarizes the scope of the project, the methodology used to establish current greenhouse emissions and future reductions, and the estimated financial results.

In the Andes, runoff from glacierized basins is an important element of water budgets, assuring year-round flows for agriculture, potable water, power generation, and ecosystem integrity. Thus, changes induced by tropical glacier retreat constitute an early case of the need for adaptation and the type and size of associated economic and social impacts caused by climate change.

Gracias a su buen desempeño económico, el Perú está en camino de consolidarse como una economía de ingreso medio, con todos los retos y oportunidades que ello conlleva. Mirando hacia el futuro, las oportunidades son muchas, aunque los retos también lo son. La persistencia de brechas en el acceso a servicios sociales, seguridad social, infraestructura básica y oportunidades económicas, entre los ámbitos rural y urbano, es en sí mismo un obstáculo hacia estadios mayores de desarrollo. El reto del Perú en la presente década será el de lograr un modelo que haga compatible el crecimiento económico, la recuperación de los necesarios equilibrios sociales y territoriales y la preservación del ambiente. En este contexto, el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo aprobó en Julio de 2012 el Documento de la Estrategia del Banco con el país 2012-2016, que constituye un acuerdo entre el Perú y el Banco para determinar los parámetros de su relación de cooperación futura. Para la confección de la Estrategia del Banco con el País 2012-2016, el Banco condujo una profunda reflexión técnica, que incorporó lo mejor de su conocimiento, experiencia y experticia sectorial, en arduo trabajo de discusión interna y externa, para generar 33 notas técnicas sectoriales. Este volumen que presentamos, incluye la selección de los 12 diagnósticos sectoriales que finalmente dieron respaldo analítico a las áreas prioritarias identificadas en el Documento de la Estrategia del Banco con el país 2012-2016, luego de culminado el minucioso proceso de diálogo y priorización con las autoridades del Gobierno del Perú.