The World Bank’s culpability in climate change: the World Bank Group’s carbon projects in the Asia-Pacific region (1949-2010)

In 2010, the 16th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) invited the World Bank to serve as the interim trustee of its Green Climate Fund, the operating entity that will manage the financial mechanisms of the UNFCCC. This was opposed by many peoples' movements and organisations, especially in the global South, and according to this paper, justifiably so. The paper shows that over the past 61 years, the Bank financed 745 projects worth USD 69.82 billion in 34 countries in the Asia and Pacific region which produced or heavily used fossil fuels. This paper argues that although the Bank recognises that fossil fuels are the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, which are causing climate change, it has never explicitly owned up to its share of the current climate crisis.