Climate change is arguably the most pressing issue of our time, so it is probably good practice to look at how some of the most important things in life relate to it. How will health, education, or food change because of climate issues, or how should they change to make things better?
But treating everything as a climate issue may prove counterproductive, as it can crowd out targeted study and solutions aimed squarely at the problem.
Somebody tell the World Bank.
According to an analysis by the Breakthrough Institute and the Center for Global Development, the majority of climate projects funded
by the World Bank between 2020 and 2022 turned out to have little to do with climate at all.
A not so climate portfolio
The World Bank’s climate portfolio comprises almost $119 billion dollars in various types of funding that it will spend over the course of 23 years. Of that, it has already invested $37 billion between 2020 and 2022 to fund 2,554 climate projects from low- and middle-income countries, including 1,179 described as being focused on climate mitigation activities.
The researchers, who analyzed every project in the portfolio, found that a large number of the ones tagged as “climate” had little to nothing to do with it, and included instead administrative and bureaucratic projects: payment automation for salaries in Afghanistan, municipal transparency in Gaza, fiscal management in Benin.
Even projects that were more specifically related to climate failed to provide accurate estimates of the greenhouse gas emission reductions the projects would deliver. This makes it hard to evaluate not only the efficacy of each project, but also the overall ability of the World Bank to deliver against its goal to reduce emissions by 194 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.
Part of the issue is one of transparency and data collection: Since it’s hard to access detailed information about the projects, it’s also difficult to measure their results. But this can lead to overstating of climate investment. In the case of the World Bank, a separate analysis by Oxfam estimated that the institution is effectively putting 40% less funding in climate change than it believes it is.
In a statement to Quartz, a spokesperson for the World Bank said: “The World Bank Group remains deeply committed to helping countries in the fight against climate change. All of the Multilateral Development Banks, including the World Bank, use the same methodology to calculate our financing for climate mitigation and adaptation. We are always looking for ways to enhance how we measure the impact of our climate finance.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated on June 17, 2023, with a statement from the World Bank.