Global Research: A new report released today by Friends of the Earth International during the UN climate talks in Bonn this week shows that the World Bank Group has been increasing its investments in fossil fuels and promoting corporate-led false solutions to climate change, including carbon trading, that serve to deepen rather than alleviate the current environmental crisis.The report, 'Catalysing Catastrophic Climate Change', follows widespread concerns voiced by developing countries about the growing role of the World Bank in delivering climate finance.
The report shows how the Bank’s dirty fossil fuel financing is on the rise, locking countries such as India and South Africa into an even greater reliance on coal. Furthermore, the Bank is driving the expansion of carbon markets, an escape hatch for rich industrialised countries from cutting their emissions, whilst causing ecological damage and the displacement of communities in the global South. And despite negative environmental, social, and climate change impacts, the World Bank is significantly scaling up support for large hydropower.
Despite the Bank’s lending for highly unsustainable projects around the world, it is seeking an influential role in the UN’s new Green Climate Fund and in mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).
Friends of the Earth International Economic Justice Program Coordinator Sebastian Valdomir said: “The World Bank is part of the climate problem, not the climate solution. Its conflicts of interest, and appalling social and environmental track record, should immediately disqualify it from playing any role whatsoever in designing the Green Climate Fund, and in climate finance more generally.”…
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