Focus on Development, not Climate, World Bank Climate Change Team Told

The World Bank’s core mission is development and language around the institution’s work and investments should align more with that and not climate, according to an internal email seen by OPIS.

“It’s all about going back to basics,” said the email sent last Friday by Valerie Hickey, global director of the climate change group at the World Bank. “That’s the tune that I heard [last] week from three distinct constituencies: Ajay [Banga, the bank’s president], the US [Environment Department’s] office, and senior representatives from Ministries of Environment, Forests and Finance across the Congo Basin,” she said.

“…We need to remember our roots as a development bank. That we are not a climate bank even as the weather is becoming a major constraint to ending poverty,” she added.

Communications regarding the World Bank’s work “also have to go back to basics”, the email said, including altering how staff in the climate change team talk about the Paris Agreement climate goals. Instead of referring to “climate finance”, it should talk about “smarter development finance that has
climate co-benefits”, according to the email.

The email does not suggest making actual changes to World Bank policy or its climate investments. The proposed changes in communications around climate do not represent changes to the bank’s core development mission and will not result in “doing less of what our clients need us to do”, the email said.

Recalibrating communication and vocabulary would be a “journey”, Hickey said.

“But it’s a journey that will get us to where our client countries, our major shareholders and our management want us to be. And be quickly,” the email said.

In November, the World Bank said it was committed to increasing its climate finance from 35% of total lending to 45% over its 2025 fiscal year, which runs between July 2024 and June 2025. In the previous fiscal year, the World Bank provided $42.6 billion in climate finance, or 44% of its total financing target for that fiscal year.

At an event at The Economic Club of Washington D.C. in late March, Banga responded to a question about how the World Bank was adapting to the current political climate in the US.

“What I’ve done over the last few months… is to go to people [on Capitol Hill] and now people in the [federal] administration and tell them what’s inside ‘climate change’. I understand the words can be not what you want, but let’s talk about what’s inside it first,” Banga said.

Banga added that half of the bank’s 45% climate finance goal for fiscal year 2025 is aimed at resiliency or adaptation efforts and the other half is focused on mitigation.

The World Bank declined to comment.

The email is part of a wider trend of institutions and corporates altering language around climate change in the wake of President Donald Trump’s election in November. Since then, the US has withdrawn from global institutions like the World Health Organization and from the Paris Agreement, the international treaty signed in 2015 aimed at limiting the rise in global temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Similarly, since President Trump assumed office, government agencies have ordered via official and unofficial guidance that certain terms like “climate crisis” and “climate science” be removed from public-facing websites, according to the New York Times.

In late March, Bloomberg reported that mentions of “sustainability and related terms on earning calls” across S&P 500 companies fell on average by 76% compared to how companies were talking about the environment three years ago.

The World Bank is owned by 189 countries, and the US is the largest single shareholder of the bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) with a 17.34% share, according to the bank’s website. The US is also the only World Bank shareholder that has veto power regarding changes in the structure of the bank.

The World Bank Group was founded in 1944 and is composed of five international organizations: the IFC, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

The bank’s main lending arms are the IBRD, which issues loans to middle-income countries, and the IDA, which provides loans and grants to the poorest countries.

Reporting by Humberto J. Rocha, hrocha@opisnet.com
Editing by Anthony Lane, alane@opisnet.com

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