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For decades now, exports and import have grown more rapidly than domestic production. This is a strong indication that, besides the rapid growth of foreign trade in final goods, trade in intermediates is becoming increasingly important. For this reason, an input-output ap-proach is more appropriate for any analysis of diversification than a traditional approach based purely on macroeconomic data.
This article analyses economic diversification in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries using data from input-output tables which are an integral part of the national accounts. We compare the performance of the GCC economies with that of a reference case, Norway, which is considered to have successfully diversified its economy despite having a large oil resource base. It also assesses these countries’ relative progress on sustainable development using a measure of the World Bank, adjusted net savings, which evaluates the true rate of savings in an economy after accounting for investments in physical and human capital, de-pletion of natural resources, and damage from environmental pollution.
The article concludes that GCC countries have, contrary to expectation, collectively per-formed relatively well on diversification, but their performance on sustainable development varies.
Specific climate adaptation and resilience measures can be efficiently designed and implemented at regional and local levels. Climate and environmental databases are critical for achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and for efficiently planning and implementing appropriate adaptation measures. Available federated and distributed databases can serve as necessary starting points for municipalities to identify needs, prioritize resources, and allocate investments, taking into account often tight budget constraints. High-quality geospatial, climate, and environmental data are now broadly available and remote sensing data, e.g., Copernicus services, will be critical. There are forward-looking approaches to use these datasets to derive forecasts for optimizing urban planning processes for local governments. On the municipal level, however, the existing data have only been used to a limited extent. There are no adequate tools for urban planning with which remote sensing data can be merged and meaningfully combined with local data and further processed and applied in municipal planning and decision-making. Therefore, our project CoKLIMAx aims at the development of new digital products, advanced urban services, and procedures, such as the development of practical technical tools that capture different remote sensing and in-situ data sets for validation and further processing. CoKLIMAx will be used to develop a scalable toolbox for urban planning to increase climate resilience. Focus areas of the project will be water (e.g., soil sealing, stormwater drainage, retention, and flood protection), urban (micro)climate (e.g., heat islands and air flows), and vegetation (e.g., greening strategy, vegetation monitoring/vitality). To this end, new digital process structures will be embedded in local government to enable better policy decisions for the future.