Emerging Markets

№ 2026-66 · October 2026 · 20 min

The Geography of Global Vulnerability

1.66 billion people live where two or more climate hazards overlap, but only 158 million of them also have limited means to adapt. They are concentrated in the heat-and-drought belt from Senegal to Pakistan and on cyclone coasts from Madagascar to Haiti. By 2050 that overlap nearly triples to 455 million, led by Nigeria. Halving poverty and strengthening coping would cut it to 263 million, more than lower emissions alone (356 million), though not in the most fragile states.

№ 2026-65 · October 2026 · 22 min

The Global Polycrisis and the Architecture of Systemic Risk

Multi-domain shock years rose from about 6% of countries a year before 2020 to 9% since, after 33% in 2020. The observed network has a sink: economic shocks, internet shutdowns and governance shocks raise the next year's risk of displacement or mortality shocks 2.5, 2.0 and 1.6 times. Low-income countries carry eleven times the multi-domain burden of rich ones, and twenty countries with 705 million people face a 30% or higher modelled risk of multi-domain shocks in 2026.

№ 2026-64 · October 2026 · 21 min

The Geography of Growing Human Exposure

The world adds 1.43 billion people by 2050, 69% of them in cities and 57% in sub-Saharan Africa. People living with 30 or more days a year above a 35 °C heat index more than double, from 1.9 to 4.1 billion. Warming drives 1.74 billion of that rise and population growth 0.44 billion, and growth lands disproportionately in hot places. City dwellers in 100-year flood zones, 507 million today, are heading for 630–690 million.

№ 2026-63 · October 2026 · 21 min

Convergent Development as Polycrisis Risk Reduction

Countries vulnerable in 2000 have closed their human-development gap at about 0.3% a year, a half-life of two centuries. Those that avoided reversals closed it three times faster, while reversals erased 13% of their gains. Higher human development makes reversals shallower and polycrisis risk lower (r = −0.84). Faster convergence with halved reversals would bring 38 of 60 vulnerable countries past an HDI of 0.70 by 2050, against 17 at the recent pace.

№ 2026-62 · October 2026 · 21 min

The Architecture of Global Polycrisis Mitigation

Every national architecture has a weak link: the median country's weakest function trails its average by 16 points, and decoupling, the most common gap, barely tracks income. In 2020–2023 national capacities explained almost none of the growth and inflation damage, but steering was the exception, associated with 62 fewer excess deaths per 100,000 and a 5.7-point smaller rise in hunger. Thin buffers leave 3.5 billion people relying on a global backstop that covers a fraction of need.

№ 2026-61 · October 2026 · 21 min

The Human Dividend of Polycrisis Prevention

About 11.6 million people a year die in six channels that polycrisis prevention targets. Matching the best quarter of income peers would protect 4.6 million of them and reaching the next income tier 7.0 million, but doing both would protect 8.6 million. The burdens cluster in the same 55 countries and share drivers such as health coverage and sanitation, and closing the gaps by 2040 would protect about 172 million lives by 2050.

№ 2026-60 · October 2026 · 20 min

The Clean Transition as a Polycrisis Mitigation Strategy

In 2022 the median fuel importer's bill jumped from 4.5% to 7.4% of GDP, and the jump tracked how much each country imported, not how clean its power was (r = −0.08). Import bills are mostly oil and gas for transport, heat and industry, so the transition protects only when it reaches those uses. When it does, it also cuts the 86% of fossil air-pollution deaths borne by importers and the emissions behind climate risk.

№ 2026-57 · October 2026 · 20 min

Escaping the Pollution–Poverty Trap

Forty-eight countries, 36 of them in sub-Saharan Africa, are trapped in two or more degradation cycles, and they hold 78% of the world's extremely poor. Polluting cooking fuel, missing sanitation and forest loss move together even among countries at the same income. Fifty-two countries escaped at least one cycle after 2000, through clean-cooking drives, sanitation campaigns and forest recovery, and cut extreme poverty by a median 26 points, more than twice as much as those that stayed trapped. Air pollution is the cycle growth has not broken.

№ 2026-56 · October 2026 · 20 min

Breaking the Climate–Development Trap

After a severe climate shock, GDP per person in low- and lower-middle-income countries falls by 1.7%, sinks to about 5% below its previous path within four years and is still 3.7% lower after eight. Upper-middle-income countries recover within four years, and earthquakes leave no lasting scar. Low-income countries now suffer climate shocks in a quarter of all years, only one in five of these has any recorded damage, and the income gap between the median rich and poor country has grown from 18 to 25 times since 1990.

№ 2026-55 · October 2026 · 20 min

The Green Development Dividend

Closing every extreme-poverty gap with targeted transfers would add just 0.07% to global CO₂. Reaching the same goal through broad growth at today's carbon intensity would add about 100 times as much. Most countries escaped mass poverty at under 2 tonnes of CO₂ per person, and 44 developing countries with 4.2 billion people cut poverty and carbon intensity together after 2015. Explicit fossil-fuel subsidies of $725 billion a year are more than six times the extreme-poverty gap.

№ 2026-54 · October 2026 · 19 min

The Clean Cooking Transition

In low- and middle-income countries, 69% of people now cook mainly with gas or electricity, up from 27% in 1990, but 2.03 billion still rely on wood, charcoal, coal or kerosene. In sub-Saharan Africa the number using polluting fuels has risen by about 340 million since 2000, and charcoal users have more than tripled. At least 1.37 billion people without clean cooking already have electricity, which makes efficient electric cooking a second lane alongside LPG. Even so, the 2015–2023 pace would leave about 1.6 billion people without clean cooking in 2030.

№ 2026-53 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Education–Climate Vulnerability Trap

Half the world's school-age children — 962 million in 35 countries — live where most 10-year-olds cannot read a simple text and climate hazard is high. Children's exposure to dangerous heat doubles by mid-century, with sub-Saharan Africa's share tripling to a quarter, yet only one in five primary schools in low-income countries has electricity to run a fan. Because schooling is among the strongest predictors of how well people cope with disasters, every lost school day today weakens tomorrow's resilience.

№ 2026-52 · October 2026 · 17 min

Demographic Growth Inside the Global Risk Envelope

Since 1975 the world's urban centres have added 2.1 billion people, and growth has leaned into the floodplain: the urban population in 100-year river flood zones tripled to 507 million while cities as a whole grew 2.3 times, with one new resident in six settling in a flood zone. Six in ten new city dwellers settled in cities exposed to at least one major hazard, and 746 million now live where two or more compound. Most of the growth still to come is unbuilt — the cheapest moment for safer settlement decisions.

№ 2026-50 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Pollution–Development Trap

In 35 countries with 1.45 billion people, from Nigeria to Bangladesh, fine-particle pollution is stuck high or still rising while income stays below $10,000 a head — and growth has not cleaned the air of the poorest third of countries at all. The loop runs both ways: poverty means smoky fuels and weak regulation, and pollution costs 3.7 years of life expectancy in lower-middle-income countries and erodes human capital. China turned the corner at $14,000 a head and India at about $7,000 — proof that clean air can come early, as growth policy rather than its reward.

№ 2026-49 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Geography of Human Vulnerability Through 2100

Humanity's centre of gravity is drifting 1,700 km towards the hot belt from West Africa to South Asia just as that belt crosses danger-level heat. By the 2090s, 2.2 billion people live with a month or more of it in a middle-of-the-road world and 5.0 billion in a fragmented, high-emission one — nearly half of them people not yet born in places not yet dangerous. Low emissions and education-led development each cut that exposure by half or more, and because half of it sits on 0.5% of inhabited land, protection can be targeted.

№ 2026-45 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Architecture of Global Convergence Under Systemic Risk

Development has been dismantling the slow crises: since the early 2000s child deaths fell in 98% of developing economies, emissions intensity in 88% and hunger in 76%. The fast systemic crises did not follow: debt service improved in only 31%, conflict in 39% and inflation in 46%, and income growth explains none of them. Beyond growth itself, only government effectiveness and clean water predict broad crisis reduction — and with convergence now stalled at 49% of economies, the missing floors are institutional.

№ 2026-44 · October 2026 · 18 min

Digital Infrastructure as a Resilience Multiplier in Crisis-Prone Developing Economies

Digital rails speed up crisis response — India, Brazil and Pakistan paid emergency cash within 7–8 days in 2020 — but they do not replace a capable state. Across 207 shocks since 1991 and the COVID recession, government effectiveness predicts recovery far better than internet use. The exception is telling: where governance is weak, every 10 extra points of account ownership before COVID went with about 7 percentage-point-years less lost output by 2023. Digital infrastructure multiplies thin state capacity most.

№ 2026-34 · October 2026 · 17 min

Mapping the Interdependencies of Twenty-First-Century Risk

Across 191 countries and 18 indicators, about half of what makes risks travel together is poverty: average link strength halves once income is held constant. What survives is a tighter web centred on conflict, displacement, resource dependence and rapid population growth. Countries stressed in three or more domains are almost all unstable, and the hubs point to where intervention breaks the most links at once.

№ 2026-31 · October 2026 · 17 min

Human Exposure to the Global Polycrisis, 2025–2100

Even if no hazard worsened, the share of humanity living in today's high-risk countries would rise from a quarter to 43% by 2100, because population is growing fastest where risk is highest. About half of the 9.5 billion babies due between now and 2100 will be born in those countries. Combining UN population projections with the INFORM risk map shows who is exposed, where and in which generation, and how far reducing risk could offset demography.

№ 2026-30 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Infrastructure of Sustainable Economic Convergence

Across 110 economies that started the century below half the OECD's income, starting poorer did not mean growing faster. Among countries with similar access to power and similar outage rates, poorer ones caught up about a percentage point a year faster for each halving of starting income. Mapping catch-up growth since 2000 against electricity, logistics, cooling and connectivity shows power as the binding gate and the others as multipliers that depend on it.

№ 2026-25 · October 2026 · 18 min

Africa Ascendant

Africa's share of humanity is returning to its seventeenth-century level and then far exceeding it, from 13.5 per cent in 2000 to a projected 37.5 per cent by 2100. Five centuries of African demography, from 1500 to scenarios for 2500, alongside the diaspora and the mixed ancestry that spreads African heritage worldwide far faster than migration does.

№ 2026-23 · October 2026 · 16 min

Resilience in an Age of Polycrisis

Exposure did not decide how hard the 2021–23 food-price cascade hit; falling currencies did. Tracing that shock month by month from gas to fertiliser, grains and household food inflation in 183 countries — and the 2026 Strait of Hormuz shock along the same chain — gives a framework for when to diversify, decouple, buffer and absorb.

№ 2026-22 · October 2026 · 12 min

The Polycrisis Century

Food, oil, markets, policy, conflict and disasters rarely go wrong in the same year: their year-to-year correlation averages 0.12. In the 2020s they did, with an average of 3.5 of six acute indicators in their worst quartile each year against 0.7 in the 2010s, on a chronic floor of record temperatures, conflict and displacement.

№ 2026-20 · October 2026 · 22 min

The Last Third

With the 2030 Agenda two-thirds spent, 36 per cent of assessable SDG targets are on track or moving moderately and 15 per cent have gone into reverse. The pattern beneath those numbers is not random, and it says a good deal about where the remaining effort should go.

№ 2026-19 · September 2026 · 23 min

From Payments to Power

Mobile payments connect households to pay-as-you-go solar, but digital collection alone does not make an energy portfolio bankable. This report examines the infrastructure, contract economics and financing structures that turn small payments into durable energy access.

№ 2026-18 · September 2026 · 21 min

Convergence Without Absorption

Half of developing economies have not narrowed the income gap since 2019. The pathways now proposed in manufacturing's place — digital services, agro-processing, green industry, minerals — are tradable and productive, and they absorb a fraction of the labour. That splits convergence into measures that used to move together.

№ 2026-17 · September 2026 · 21 min

Navigating the Transition

Forecasts of fossil demand now disagree about the direction after 2030, which makes prediction a poor basis for policy. What is not in dispute is that resource revenue is becoming shorter-dated and more variable. That is an asset–liability problem, and it has four known treatments.

№ 2026-16 · September 2026 · 20 min

Convergence Through Crisis

Pakistan imported 17 GW of solar panels in a single year. South Africa's rooftops went from under 1 GW to over 7 GW. Lebanon's solar capacity rose thirteenfold. None of these were planned transitions; all followed a crisis that made the incumbent unaffordable or unavailable. This report asks what determines whether such a window produces a leapfrog or a diesel generator.

№ 2026-15 · September 2026 · 21 min

Financing the Synergy

The case for investing in adaptation and mitigation together is physical and well established. The obstacle is not the argument but the cash flow: an avoided loss has no revenue line, so private capital funds about nine per cent of adaptation. This report sets out five instruments that convert avoided losses into something financeable, and how to use them without splitting the asset.

№ 2026-14 · September 2026 · 21 min

Food, Energy, Water: Disruption and Substitution

Nexus disruptions travel along whichever link is tightest: gas into fertiliser into food in 2022, drought into hydropower and into shipping lanes in 2023 and 2024. Clean technologies break those particular chains — and create new ones. This report maps four substitutions, what each buys, and what each newly requires.

№ 2026-13 · September 2026 · 22 min

Climate-Resilient Industrialization Pathways

Green industrial strategy tends to offer every sector the same package. But an aluminium smelter is stopped by the price of electricity, an electronics plant by a four-hour outage, and a garment factory by a heatwave or a flood. Sorting industries by their binding constraint produces a different — and cheaper — sequence of investments.

№ 2026-12 · September 2026 · 22 min

Integrating Adaptation and Mitigation

Climate policy treats adaptation and mitigation as parallel agendas competing for finance. In economies building both capital stocks at once, they are better understood as complements in production — with a minority of cases where they genuinely compete. This report sets out where the dependencies run, where the conflicts are real, and how to appraise an asset that discharges both duties.

№ 2026-11 · September 2026 · 24 min

Air Quality Improvement as a Co-Benefit of Clean Energy Transition in Megacities

Air pollution contributed to 7.9 million deaths in 2023, and an estimated 5.13 million excess deaths a year are attributable to fossil-fuel air pollution that a transition would remove. The burden is heaviest in the thirty-three megacities, where combustion is densest and exposure closest. This report sets out the evidence that decarbonization is, in practice, the largest public-health programme available to them, and how to design it to collect that return.

№ 2026-10 · September 2026 · 20 min

Climate Litigation Goes South

Climate litigation was a northern sport: a Dutch foundation, a German grandmother, an American youth cohort. In the past decade the centre of gravity has shifted south, where courts have ordered governments to implement their own climate laws, blocked coal plants and deforestation, and written a right to a stable climate into constitutions that never mentioned it.

№ 2026-09 · September 2026 · 19 min

Scaling Low-Cost Adaptation Technologies Across Climate-Vulnerable Developing Economies

Cheap adaptation technologies with strong measured returns are distributed and then abandoned. The usual explanations blame the money or the country, but neither accounts for two technologies diffusing at wildly different rates through the same channel. Five attributes of the product explain most of the variation.

№ 2026-06 · September 2026 · 19 min

Climate Adaptation as Infrastructure for Global Polycrisis Risk Reduction

Adaptation is counted as a stock of assets, but what protects people is a service that keeps working, and a service runs on a chain. Reliability multiplies rather than averages, so where an investment sits in the network matters more than what it costs — and polycrisis is the case where the links fail together.

№ 2026-04 · September 2026 · 21 min

Breaking the Pollution–Poverty–Climate Nexus in Emerging Economies

Pollution, poverty and climate cause one another in every direction, and are managed by three ministries on three timetables. Integrated strategies keep failing not because the analysis is wrong but because integrated things must still be bought by a single budget holder on a single clock. The remedy is to appraise on the fastest.

№ 2026-03 · September 2026 · 24 min

Climate Adaptation and Development Convergence Across the Global South

Poor countries only began catching up with rich ones around 2000, and the resulting convergence runs at one to two per cent of the income gap a year. Climate hazard already destroys one to two per cent of output a year in low- and middle-income countries. Adaptation, read against convergence, is not insurance but growth-retention policy.

№ 2026-02 · September 2026 · 23 min

Scaling Climate Adaptation Through Development Finance and Technology Diffusion

The resilience gap is usually described as a shortage of money. It is better understood as two gaps wearing one name — hard adaptation blocked at a capital gate, soft adaptation blocked at a delivery gate — and neither closes while both are treated as the first.

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