Climate Finance Unchecked: What Is the World Bank Doing with All the Money?

Oxfam, a British NGO, describes itself as “a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice.” Among its many causes is climate change, as this excerpt from its website tell us:

It’s now or never to take decisive climate action.

The super-rich and the fossil fuel industry are wrecking our climate, and the next president will have to lead the fight to solve the climate crisis in bold and unapologetic ways. The world sits on the cusp of breaching the 1.5 Celsius target to prevent catastrophic climate change. But the U.S. has done big things before—and we can do it again.

I point this out for purposes of credibility. If Oxfam says there is corporatism, fraud and grifting in the funding of the New Green Deal, it's most likely true. And, Oxfam just came out with a report of its investigation into the climate change projects funded by the World Bank. Click the image to access it.

Jo Nova has a nice story on it here, but I'd like to share some of the summary itself, which follows (emphasis and paragraphing added):

The role of multilateral development banks (MDBs) in climate finance cannot be overstated. MDBs provide both concessional and nonconcessional funding for development. Given the increasing challenges the climate crisis imposes on development efforts, MDBs have been increasingly channeling their financial resources for climate-related projects in their member countries. According to the latest MDB joint climate finance report, MDBs together contributed US$60.9 billion in climate finance in low- and middle-income countries in 2022.

The World Bank alone accounted for 52% of the climate finance reported by all MDBs in 2022, making it the single largest source of climate finance in the world. The World Bank’s role in climate finance has significantly increased over the past decade. In 2016 the World Bank made public its first Climate Change Action Plan and announced that it aimed to make climate finance 28% of its total portfolio by 2020.

By 2018 the Bank reported that it had exceeded its target, with climate finance reaching 32% of its total portfolio. In 2021 the Bank set a new climate finance target of 35%, just 3 percent more than the 32% it had reported for 2018. Then, in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 the Bank reported that it had exceeded its target, with climate finance reaching 36% and 41% of total financing, respectively. In 2023, during the Conference of the Parties (COP) 28, the Bank announced a new climate finance target of 45% of total financing by 2025.

During the World Bank’s 2023 Annual Meetings, the Bank reviewed and updated its mission and vision to "end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet," explicitly recognizing as part of its mandate the intersection between development finance and climate finance…

What we see here is that the World Bank has shifted its priorities from development for the purposes of alleviating poverty to financing the Big Green Grift. The Oxfam folks are never going to put it that way, of course, because they're true green believers. Nonetheless, they are noticing the big shift.

And, they're wondering if the bankers are lying to them, thinking that maybe they're really not spending all the money claimed on climate change. They've not yet considered the opposite possibility, but they're certainly wise to be skeptical and here's more from the report summary.

Unfortunately, the World Bank’s published climate finance data includes only ex ante figures – that is, the amount of climate finance a project is determined to include based on an assessment of the project before it is approved. The Bank does not conduct ex post analyses of projects to report on the actual amount of climate finance delivered. With this level of information, it is impossible to determine whether the Bank is truly stepping up its climate investments…

Given the Bank’s lack of reporting on ex post climate finance, climate finance outcomes, or impacts on mitigation and adaptation goals, this report estimates the difference between the climate finance counted by the Bank at a project’s approval stage and its actual expenditures for mitigation and adaptation activities in the project by the time the project has ended.

Our findings show that for each World Bank project, the average deviation between budgeted amounts and expenditures lies between 26% and 43%.

This means that, on average, any World Bank project that has reported a share of climate finance for mitigation and/or adaptation at the approval stage can be expected to have ultimately delivered an amount that differs from what was planned by between 26% and 43%.

Across the portfolio of World Bank climate finance projects between 2017 and 2023, the total value of such deviation between budgeted and actual expenditures lies between US$24.28 billion and US$41.32 billion.

This large pool of finance could include the funding of new climate actions as well as the defunding of other climate actions. Overall, however, the impact of this amount is unknown, as there is simply no assessment of how this climate finance was allocated or reallocated as projects were executed.

This analysis of budgeted versus expenditure finance for World Bank projects demonstrates the serious flaws of assessing and reporting climate finance based only on what a project aims to do and not on whether those planned climate finance figures were actually spent on the identified climate finance activities.

Furthermore, in collecting data for this research, we found several issues with the Bank’s reporting structures and recordkeeping that are cause for serious concern for any stakeholder interested in using the Bank’s publicly available project information to understand what the Bank is actually spending climate money on through investment project financing.

The report, whatever one may think of the methodology, which doesn't effectively distinguish between underspending and overspending, demonstrates there is no accountability with respect to climate spending at the World Bank.

That's all one needs to know, to be honest. It's just a big globalist money pot, the controllers of which are answerable to no one. The Oxfam investigators are correct to ask questions, but that reality hasn't yet occurred to them. They're only worried their climate cause may be getting shorted. It's more likely the opposite, of course, because green energy projects are ripe for exploitation these days.

#Oxfam #WorldBank #Spending #ClimateChange