The World Bank’s climate change record [search] is very bad, its economic and environment work are rife with conflicts of interest, and thus it must not be entrusted with managing financial resources raised to address global climate change. It makes much better sense for the UNFCCC to be entrusted with the role of climate change international financier [search]. I am not alone in this assessment, as developing countries and environmental groups have accused the World Bank of making a power play [ark] to seize control of the billions of dollars of aid that will be used to tackle climate change in the next four decades.

Despite having an international infrastructure in place, the Bank is ill-suited to play an honest, good-faith role in environmental conservation. Fundamentally the World Bank is (not surprisingly) a bank concerned with economic growth and implementing capitalist economic dogma. The World Bank has and continues to subsidize fossil fuels, mega-dams, monoculture agriculture, rainforest logging and a host of other environmental ills. When trusted with international environmental funding in the past, as with the World Bank portion of the Global Environmental Facility [search], they have proven unable to reconcile environmental conservation with their economic role.