World Bank Annual Meetings, October 13, 2023 from 2:00 - 3:30 PM local time, Marrakech, Morocco
Watch via Live Stream here (recording available after).
To put more pressure on the World Bank Group to stop funding fossil fuels and come into alignment with the Paris Agreement, civil society organizations, including Bank Climate Advocates, are joining forces in critical sessions on panels, meetings with Bank Directors and Management, and in demonstrations at the World Bank 2023 Annual Meetings in Marrakech from October 9-14, 2023
The Report released October 6, 2023, details how the ongoing mining activity and the operation of captive coal power on Obi Island serves as evidence of International Finance Corporation (IFC) violating its own policies by failing to ensure its Financial Intermediary clients prevent climate change harms, destruction of natural resources, and adverse environmental and social impacts to local communities as IFC's board adopted safeguards require.
In addition to community impacts, the Report exposes that IFC continues to fall short of fulfilling its commitments to stop financing coal power plants, which is one of many critical parts of its promise to align its investments with the Paris Agreement. The Obi Island project IFC is enabling through violations of its policies applicable to its financial intermediary investments (other banks and financial institutions IFC sends funds to for investments), contributes to the climate crisis by generating massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, which reached 3,489,944 tons of CO2e per year in 2022 alone. This is six times Timor Leste's emissions in 2021. Click here for the Report.
On September 1, 2023, Bank Climate Advocates and 13 civil society organizations (CSOs) from the Global South and North submitted this Reply to IFC Management's July 7, 2023 Response to BCA's and 11 CSO's May 1, 2023 Request for Corrective Action.
The Request for Corrective Action asking the IFC to cure its systematic failures to adhere to its climate change policies prior to project financing, extensively documents the IFC's systematic failures from 2012 to the present to adhere to the requirements of its Board adopted policies applicable to GHG emissions quantification, impacts, mitigation, and alternatives analysis before project financing. The corrective action must be accomplished as soon as possible for the IFC to play its part in assuring the 1.5°C warming goal is met, to prevent its projects from harming Affected Communities , and to ensure it will and can implement its policies and Paris Agreement Methodology as applied to both its direct and financial intermediary investments.
On May 1, 2023, Bank Climate Advocates and 11 civil society organizations from around the world submitted this Request to the IFC. The Request extensively documents the IFC's systematic failures from 2012 to the present to adhere to the requirements of its Board adopted policies applicable to GHG emissions quantification, impacts, mitigation, and alternatives analysis before project financing.
This internal IFC reform and corrective action must be accomplished as soon as possible for the IFC to play its part in assuring the 1.5°C warming goal is met, to meet its objectives of coming into alignment with the Paris Agreement and mitigating climate change, to prevent its projects from harming Affected Communities as its policies require, and to ensure it will and can
implement its policies and Paris Agreement Methodology as applied to both its direct and financial intermediary investments.
World Bank Spring Meetings, April 13, 2023, Washington D.C., USA
To put more pressure on the World Bank Group to stop funding fossil fuels and come into alignment with the Paris Agreement, civil society organizations, including Bank Climate Advocates, joined forces in critical sessions on panels at the World Bank 2023 Spring Meetings and took protest to the streets of Washington, D.C.
BCA's Jason Weiner pictured on the right holding an oil pipeline.