WB Special Envoy on Climate Change

Andrew Steer: Well, some people say why would the World Bank be interested in climate change? Aren’t you a development agency, don’t you worry about reducing poverty in the world? Why would you worry about climate change? The reason we worry about climate change is that if you care about poverty reduction in today’s world, you have to care also about climate change, because climate change is already hurting developing countries. There are four ways in which climate change hurts development. First, temperatures rise. And that can hurt agriculture. And it can change disease patterns as well. Second, sea level rises. The expectation of scientists now is that sea level will rise by over one meter. Over 350 million people in the cities in the developing world would be affected by that very directly - flooding. The third thing that happens with climate change is that you have more extreme weather events like typhoons, hurricanes and so on. And a lot of countries we work in are very threatened. Countries like Vietnam or Philippine for example, very very threatened by typhoons. So, that is getting worse to worse. So, that is bad for development. And finally, the hydrological cycle, that’s the water cycle, has shifted, so that you can’t any longer predict rainfall. Some areas get wetter and many get drier. For a county like this part of China that is a real concern as well. So, for those four reasons, we really have to grapple with the issue of climate change.

And what’s our strategy? Well, for developing countries, first, they have to figure out what they should do in the light of climate change. They have to adapt. We are helping about 90 countries now, design and implement adaptation strategies. That’s to make their economies more resilient to climate change. The second thing we do is to help with countries be part of the solution. So, we are helping countries to move to low carbon parts. So, in China for example, that’s one of the main thing we do with the Chinese government. We’re working on about a hundred countries on mitigation. So, introducing renewable energy, energy efficiency, helping urban design to make it more low carbon, a whole range of issues. Agriculture, their way of designing agriculture that would actually suck carbon into the soil. Forestry, we got a very major program on forestry. For all these reasons, climate change is very central part of our work nowadays.

Anchor: So far, what have been the successes and areas for improvement in the World Bank’s climate change initiatives?

Andrew Steer: I think we’ve seen real progress. I won’t particularly want to give the World Bank all the credit because we like to give credit to our client countries. So, for example, we are seeing that more than a hundred countries now have targets for renewable energy. We are happy to be involved in helping those countries design targets and then actually design, we finance renewable energy programs. There are forty countries today in the developing world that have feeding tariffs. So feeding tariffs are when electricity grids will pay producers of renewable energy to deliver renewable energy. So, that is something we work on. We work in every sector, in renewable energy, transportation for example, in urban design, in housing design, in building standards and forestry. We also run the largest climate funds in the world -- they’re called the Climate Investment Funds. They’re about US$6.5 billion. And we implement them together with our regional development bank colleagues. And those have been up and running for about three years. And that money is disbursing and going very well. That US$6.5 billion of climate money is leveraging more than US$45 billion of clean investment in in climateinvestment. So, there’s a lot that’s going well. are a lot going well. We are very encouraged. The problem is that even there are all going well right now. There’s a lot of progress. But that is not enough. There are over 90 countries in the world that have made commitments to address climate change and to reduce their carbon and greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. But even if you add all of those up, it is still nowhere near enough to get to where we need to get to.So, on the one hand, I think we are very pleased with the progress especially we and our client countries are making. On the other hand, we are really on the beginning. We need to do a lot, a lot more.

Anchor: How much money would the World Bank budget for the climate change initiatives each year? What is the breakdown for various programs? Moreover, how much support China will get from the World Bank each year for climate change programs?

Andrew Steer: Well, as I mentioned before, we have certain special funds for climate changes, so the climate investment fund we have US$6.5 billion and that goes about US$4 billion for what we called clean technology. And then there is a special fund called the strategic climate fund that is for lowing income countries. And that has about another US$2.5 billion in there. And there we have windows for renewable energy, for forests and for adaptation. So that is an example of a special fund that we have. We also have implemented an agency of the global environment facility, but then equally important; our regular activities are increasingly focusing on climate changes. So last year, if you looked at all of the country strategies that we prepared together with the countries, the World Bank helped with these this strategies, you will see that climate change was one of the main features in 90 percent of them. So developing countries care about climate change. That is why they ask us to help them on that. So if you add all of we do on renewable energy, on green cities and on agriculture, you will find it adds to several billion dollars a year. And you also asked about china. (Anchor: Yeah, how much support china will get?) In china , something like almost half of all we do here is link to climate change, probably about I understand about 70 percent, we have to check on the number, about 70 percent of all the World Bank does in china is related to the environment, in one way or another. I think it has just done the half of what we do is specifically link to climate changes. So for example, just this afternoon, we came for a meeting with the Beijing City government. Beijing is doing all kinds of important things. We help them at the time of Olympics to reduce pollution, reduce greenhouse gases, and reduce coal consumption and so on. And now we are helping them on some other issues relating to renewable energy, photovoltaics, energy efficiency and so on. So those would be some of the things we do, but we have a wide program here in china including forestry- the largest forest project that we have in the world this year in china and because china has done something quite remarkable things. In the old days, the number of trees in china was shrinking, every year in the past the trees were in lost. The last ten years, every year the number of trees in china has grown. I mean the massive afforestation program. And the other countries are trying to catch up, because of what china has done in last ten years, the total forest cover of Asia has actually now turned around from the declining. Now it is just starting to increase. Even though there are countries in the Asia who is losing a lot of trees, some extend, because there are more trees here. Now simply growing trees does not solve the problems, but it is a useful start.

Anchor: In the end, could you please say something about your expectations on Durban Climate Change Conference?

Andrew Steer: Well, of course, we would love to see a global deal on the climate. That would be very nice if all the countries in the world could agree. No. 1, we want to limit temperature increases to one and a half or two degrees. No. 2, this is how much we will have to reduce our carbon missions. No. 3, we can arrange certain finances go from rich countries to poor countries. We all agree on a common, but differentiated response to climate change. That would nice if we had a global deal. It’s not likely that we are going to manage to get a global deal in Durban, quite frankly. The politics internationally, I mean economics internationally right now doesn’t suggest we are going to get, but can make an important progress. Other some big political issues, such as what happens to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires and answers for the negotiators to really negotiate. We hope that some way, or figuring out a way, when the end of 2012 comes, we don’t just end any kind of, sort of, formal regime, but we don’t know about that, quite frankly. Second, there’s the issue of money. Now, what we hope is that the green fund that was agreed last year in Cancun and during this last year’s been designed. We hope that in Durban, that fund would be lodged. It doesn’t mean it has able to get money yet, but what it does mean is that it would become an entity and would have a board of directors, and could, over the next two or three years, really be designed in detail and then get money that goes in so we can help the developing countries. That’s the second thing. There are numbers of other things, actually, would be very useful, or we think possible. So for example, we think that the system of technology centers worldwide would be agreed and will be financed. And that would be very good because we will help bring technology to countries and to businesses in the developing world, such one thing. Other thing we hope is the agriculture will be cooperated under the convention. Agriculture is the sector which is most threatened by climate change. It looks like agriculture yields in Africa, for example, put forward by 25 percent because of the climate change. So agriculture is the most affected sector but also agriculture is one of the causes of some climate change, so probably almost 20 percent of greenhouse gases originate from activities in agricultural sector. So it’s threatened by climate change and it has opportunity to help address the climate change. That’s why we would like agriculture to cope with it. We are not sure we will lessen the case, but certainly it would be good. Then there are several other things: carbon markets, one thing is important. Adaptation is another issue. We hope to set up adaptation committee that actually will do something that’s really useful, will help countries get advice on their national adaptation plans, get financing in for adaptation. There’s progress on forests that could be made. There’s an agreement that forests can now be financed by climate finance at the national level, but there’s quite a lot of things to be negotiated on what we call “Baselines”. So there’s a number of sort of fairly tactical things, but each one of these actually can make quite a bit of a contribution. So we’re hopeful that it would add some value, what’s really important is the trust in the process between developing countries, developed countries, rich and poor countries should be sustained as the process moves on, because we really do need a global deal and we need it soon.

Anchor: I’d like thank you again for your informative and detailed introduction. The China Development Gateway is looking forward to more cooperation with the World Bank. Thanks you!

Andrew Steer: Thank you very much!

Anchor: Thanks for watching. See you next time.