WB Concerns with 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.