At least $24 billion in World Bank funds for climate initiatives are unaccounted for, according to a new report.
Somewhere between $24 billion and $41 billion in climate financing – potentially 40% of all the funds sent to the World Bank for climate change initiatives – has gone missing due to poor record-keeping practices, reports the international aid organization Oxfam.
Oxfam says it conducted an audit of the banks’ 2017-2023 climate finance portfolio and found there is no clear public record showing where the climate funds went or how they were used, making it impossible to assess the effectiveness of the spending.
Oxfam says it’s also unclear if any of the money was even spent on the things related to the World Bank’s stated agenda, such as climate-related initiatives, clean energy investments and helping low and middle-income countries protect their people from the impact of climate change.
An anonymous insider at the bank told the New York Post that the amount of missing money could actually be 10 times higher than what Oxfam is reporting.
“All the figures are routinely made up… Nobody has a clue about who spends what.”
Says Kate Donald, head of Oxfam International’s Washington D.C. Office,
“The Bank is quick to brag about its climate finance billions – but these numbers are based on what it plans to spend, not on what it actually spends once a project gets rolling. This is like asking your doctor to assess your diet only by looking at your grocery list, without ever checking what actually ends up in your fridge.”
Donald said Oxfam had to “sift through layers of complex and incomplete reports,” only to find many gaps and inconsistencies in all the data.
“The fact that this information is so hard to access and understand is alarming – it shouldn’t take a team of professional researchers to figure out how billions of dollars meant for climate action are being spent. This should be transparent and accessible to everyone, most importantly communities who are meant to benefit from climate finance.”
The World Bank is the largest single provider of climate finance, accounting for 52% of all the funds from all multilateral development banks combined, according to Oxfam.
In response to the report, a World Bank spokesperson said,
“While we dispute these findings, we value our ongoing engagements with Oxfam and other civil society groups on our climate work and on pushing us to be more transparent.”
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