A Wrong Turn from Rio

A Wrong Turn from Rio
The World Bank's Road to Climate Catastrophe
Jim Vallette, Daphne Wysham, and Nadia Martínez
SEEN/IPS//TNI, 10 December 2004

This report is available in PDF

Press Release: New IPS Report Exposes World Bank Climate Malpractice

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA: Researchers from the Institute for Policy Studies releaseD a report challenging the World Bank's climate changing investments at the tenth Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention. The report assesses the ways in which the world's leading development institution, the World Bank, entrusted with carrying out the goals of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, has not only failed to live up to this mandate but has actually undermined it.

"The World Bank poses a hazard to climate stability," said Jim Vallette, report co-author. "Instead of fulfilling the role world leaders entrusted them with in Rio, they are now actually profiting from pollution of the Earth's atmosphere, both via finance for accelerated extraction of fossil fuels and via carbon trading."

The report, entitled, Wrong Turn From Rio: The World Bank's Road to Climate Catastrophe, reveals:

• Despite the expectations raised at 1992's Rio Earth Summit that the World Bank would help finance renewable energy, the Bank approves another fossil fuel project once every 14 days. Its renewable energy lending is overwhelmed by fossil fuel financing by a 17 to 1 ratio.
• The World Bank has misled both its board and the international community by inflating its investments in renewable energy, admitting to serious errors but not correcting them publicly.
• The Bank has developed around $1 billion in carbon trade transactions, and is positioning itself to profit handsomely from these projects through commissions. The Bank's projects are coming under heavy criticism - even from staunch supporters of carbon trade - because of on-the-ground impacts.
• Over 80% of all oil projects financed by the World Bank since 1992 are for export back to the wealthy Northern countries, accounting for over half of the carbon dioxide emissions associated with Bank energy programs.

"There is a crisis of democracy at the World Bank," charged report co-author Nadia Martinez. "The Bank does far more to advance the U.S. government and corporate agendas than it does to alleviate poverty and to aid the energy-poor."

The IPS report urges global negotiators at the Climate Convention to kick the World Bank out of carbon trading schemes taking place under the Clean Development Mechanism, and to prohibit the use of development finance in export-oriented oil, gas, and coal projects.

Wrong Turn from Rio co-authors Nadia Martinez and Jim Vallette will be releasing the report in Buenos Aires on International Human Rights Day, Dec. 10. Other speakers at the press conference will address the impacts of World Bank carbon finance. They include representatives from Indigenous Environmental Network, World Rainforest Movement, CDM Watch, and Oilwatch.