Send to Friend

When you want to quit smoking, do you call a tobacco company? That in essence is what civil society groups were wondering when they met last week to evaluate the climate-friendly announcements coming out of the World Bank.

World Bank leaders had convened in Washington DC -- abloom with cherry blossoms -- for their annual spring meeting, and announced plans to launch two new climate-change funds. One new pot of Bank money is focused on the development of clean technology, and the other pot earmarked for ‘resilience’—helping countries adapt to rising sea levels, increased intensity of storms, drought, and other economic harms resulting from climate change.

These two new funds are in addition to the Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), launched last year to put a bounty on ‘avoided deforestation’ in tropical rainforest nations.

Sound like good ideas, right? Clean technology, adaptation funds, valuing standing forests—what’s not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out, because the Bank has another face – as an institution that simultaneously exacerbates the problem of global climate change. The Bank, you see, isn’t working to dampen rising temperatures; rather, it’s fanning the flames, despite these latest announcements.