This report examines child labour and education in rural Myanmar. It highlights how poverty, conflict, and natural disasters, including a 2025 earthquake, drive child labour. It provides strategic recommendations for the ARISE project to improve education access, strengthen livelihoods, and eliminate hazardous work for children.

This report examines the integration of sustainability standards and initiatives (SSIs) into public mining governance. Through surveys and case studies in Brazil, Madagascar, and Sweden, it demonstrates how voluntary standards complement mandatory regulations to address environmental, social, and governance risks, supporting policy formulation, implementation, and transparent reporting.

This report examines how rigid power purchase agreements for coal power in India, Indonesia, and Pakistan create unsustainable debt and delay the energy transition. It highlights how these contracts lock in expensive, polluting energy and proposes policy solutions including payouts, technology swaps, renegotiation, and litigation.

This NBER working paper examines the impact of air pollution on 10 million US high school students. It finds that moderate pollution levels reduce annual learning by 19 per cent. Disadvantaged students experience three times more harm, significantly widening racial and socio-economic achievement gaps.

This report evaluates distributed energy resources across Australia, India and Bangladesh. It examines rooftop solar and battery uptake, highlighting their role in reducing fossil fuel reliance and grid demand. The analysis provides country-specific recommendations to overcome regulatory barriers, improve financing access and ensure an equitable energy transition.

This briefing examines policy choices for scaling sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) and Power-to-X (PtX) in Australia. It highlights the need for integrated policy packages, robust sustainability certification, and cross-portfolio coordination to transition from bio-based fuels to synthetic alternatives, ensuring long-term decarbonisation and fuel security.

This report advocates for an Asian Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to harmonise carbon pricing across Asia-Pacific. Focusing on steel, aluminium, and cement, it proposes international collaboration between Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea to accelerate industrial decarbonisation, address carbon leakage, and unlock green commodity trade.

This report evaluates Indonesia's enabling framework conditions for subnational climate finance. It identifies critical gaps in institutional capacity, financial architecture, and data accessibility. Recommendations focus on expanding urban-specific incentives, leveraging blended finance, and synchronising digital platforms to improve local climate governance and bridge the national investment gap.

This research explores scaling parametric insurance to enhance municipal climate resilience in emerging markets. It identifies key barriers to uptake, maps the existing support ecosystem, and proposes three priority actions to improve the financial viability and affordability of insurance solutions for subnational governments worldwide.

NBER research into the EU-ETS reveals that carbon pricing reduces emissions primarily through market reallocation and long-run technology adoption, rather than short-run input substitution. Doubling permit prices reduces aggregate emissions by 31% over five years, with moderate impacts on total output and employment across the production network.

This report examines how corruption enabled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and explores its escalation during the conflict. It details growth in criminal convictions, systemic theft within the military, and the erosion of procurement transparency. It further analyses the impact of sanctions on Russian oligarchs and the emergence of war beneficiaries.

This report analyses disability employment quota systems across Indonesia, ASEAN, and East Asia. It identifies five legal models, ranging from binding levy-subsidy architectures to voluntary incentive-based approaches. Recommendations for Indonesia include clarifying calculation methodologies, establishing structured incentive frameworks, and implementing graduated compliance pathways to improve inclusive employment outcomes.

This ILO research brief examines how multinational enterprises and supply chains drive the transition from informal to formal economies. By leveraging market incentives, technology transfers, and innovative procurement, MNEs can improve working conditions, social protection, and productivity for lower-tier MSMEs, supporting global decent work objectives.

This report examines how 750 global companies can leverage established climate maturity to accelerate nature-related transition planning. Findings reveal a significant gap, with 69% possessing climate transition plans compared to just 2% for nature. It identifies four pathways—reporting, risk management, value chain mapping and technical synergies—to bridge this divide.

This report quantifies the economic burden of climate-fuelled bushfires in Australia, projecting an average annual cost of $6 billion. It examines how climate change intensifies fire weather and provides recommendations for federal investment in preparedness, community resilience, and the rapid reduction of coal, oil, and gas pollution.

This field experiment in rural Sierra Leone evaluates upgrading Village Savings and Loan Associations into digital financial service agents. While infrastructure expands access, introducing consumer feedback mechanisms significantly improves service quality, transaction usage, and household shock mitigation. Results demonstrate that accountability is essential for developing functional, scalable financial markets.