World Bank "Sustainability" - 332 Fossil Fuel Projects In 12 Yrs

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While the World Bank says it encourages "environmentally responsible" economic growth in developing countries, activists wonder why it has supported 332 fossil fuel projects in the past 12 years.

According to a study by the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network (SEEN), a project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, since the World Bank committed itself in 1992 to financing sustainable energy projects in poor countries, only one of every 17 programmes has focused on renewable sources of energy. These statistics, contained in the report "A Wrong Turn from Rio", were confirmed to IPS by Nadia Martínez, Latin America coordinator of SEEN, after the presentation of a new World Bank publication at the tenth climate change conference (COP-10) currently taking place in Buenos Aires.

At Tuesday's launch of the World Bank's annual report "Environment Matters", whose theme this year is sustainable growth in the developing South, the director of the Bank's environment department, Warren Evans, said it is true that the international lending institution supports fossil fuel projects. But he argued that this support is necessary because the needs of the poor must be met.

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But SEEN noted that the promises made by the World Bank since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to finance renewable energy projects have not been fulfilled, and that on the contrary, the great majority of projects have involved fossil fuels. The environmental network estimates that the World Bank has invested more than 28 billion dollars in fossil fuel projects in the past 12 years, including "extraction, power plants and sector reforms." "There have been 332 projects from 1992 to 2004 that will release 43.4 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere," Martínez commented to IPS. The activist also argued that it is not fair for the World Bank, which should take the initiative in financing clean energy projects in poor countries, to continue fomenting greenhouse gas emissions while participating in the "business opportunities" created to help reduce emissions."

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