World Bank President Ajay Banga defended the bank’s commitment to devoting 45% of its annual lending to climate-related projects in fiscal year 2025, which ends June 30, saying that focusing on climate doesn’t distract from the bank’s overall mission to end poverty.
The World Bank committed to ramping up the percentage from 35% to 45% last year, when it managed to reach 44%. And it has continued using phrases such as “climate change” and “climate finance” despite the Trump administration’s attempts to ban use of such terms by the organizations it funds.
“The words might be a problem in different people’s eyes, but when you unpeel the onion on what’s inside the 45% that we committed to, we are not taking away from education and schools and development to fund something,” Banga said in a call with reporters Wednesday ahead of the bank’s Spring Meetings in Washington, D.C. next week.
About the author
Jesse Chase-Lubitz
Jesse Chase-Lubitz covers climate change and multilateral development banks for Devex. She previously worked at Nature Magazine, where she received a Pulitzer grant for an investigation into land reclamation. She has written for outlets such as Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and The Japan Times, among others. Jesse holds a master’s degree in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics.
