WB's Initiative Sees Progress

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.