World Bank wants to tackle climate change — but does project design measure up?

The World Bank is undertaking a number of changes to try to better address climate change in its operations, including tools to address climate risks and resilience in projects, more systematic accounting of greenhouse gas emissions from projects, and ongoing organizational efforts to incentivize staff to include climate change concerns in project design. All these efforts come as World Bank President Jim Kim has ramped up rhetoric about the institution’s role in addressing global climate change — but the reality is that bank operations have fallen short of meeting that goal. Only 25 percent of projects consider the risks posed by climate change in their design, and even fewer take into account the impact of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report by the World Resources Institute released on Wednesday. The report — which looked at projects approved by the World Bank’s board of directors over 18 months between July 2012 and January 2014 — examined how how the institution performed on including sustainability in project design. It found that not only were projects not looking at opportunities for climate change mitigation, they were not even addressing risks posed by climate change to programs. “We were quite surprised by the lack of attention paid on the resilience and adaptation side of the equation,” Clifford Polycarp, senior associate and deputy director of the Sustainable Finance Program at WRI, said about the report. “Given that a lot of that would be in the interests of the countries and something that would be just development practice and good project design, to factor in increasingly certain risks associated with climate impacts into what very often are major physical infrastructure and social infrastructure projects.” World Bank: We’re working on it Karin Kemper, head of climate policy and finance at the World Bank, didn’t dispute the findings, but she told Devex that the survey didn’t capture efforts currently underway that address some of the report’s recommendations. The institution, for example, is now being more systematic in accounting for greenhouse gas emissions from bank-financed projects. Activities in sectors such as energy, forestry, and transport are already — or soon to be — rolling out greenhouse gas accounting, and all sectors will be covered by 2016, Kemper said. In addition, starting July 1, all new projects financed by through the International Development Association, the World Bank’s fund for the poorest countries, will be screened for climate risk and resilience using risk assessment tools and guidelines that are currently being developed. Those tools, Kemper explained, will go beyond a do-no-harm approach to make climate risk an integral part of project design. In addition, at least 25 IDA countries will be developing multisectoral plans and investments to manage climate and disaster risk. The bank currently lacks a clear plan to integrate the same kind of analysis into projects funded through its middle-income window. Perhaps a more important question, suggested Polycarp, is how World Bank staff will be incentivized to incorporate climate risks and concerns into project design — an outcome that will depend heavily on Jim Kim’s ambitious reform agenda currently underway at the bank. The recently created “cross-cutting solution area” dedicated to climate and headed by Vice President Rachel Kyte will be responsible for working out those incentives and making sure they are integrated across the bank’s portfolio. The results of those types of changes may not become apparent immediately, but will certainly be critical to the institution’s efforts of making sure that the reality of its operations matches its rhetoric. Read more development aid news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.