The annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, last week yielded disappointingly little progress on climate finance, climate diplomats warned, opening what is likely to be a contentious buildup to a major showdown at the COP29 summit in November.  Headlines focused on the US, Japan, and several European countries collectively contributing an additional $11 billion to the World Bank’s lending capacity, and how that fell far short of the estimated $1 trillion per year that developing countries need to adapt to climate change. But an even bigger issue looms, one which received even less attention from rich countries, and which is in many ways more vexing: Developing countries face a crippling mountain of debt that — regardless of how much their richer peers hand over — will derail any efforts to combat climate change. And although leaders like Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley have spent the last several years articulating detailed solutions, and despite World Bank President Ajay Banga having expressed much more eagerness to address climate change than his predecessor, last week’s meeting closed without any concrete steps. “You haven’t seen real transformation of the institutions,” Majid Al Suwaidi, a longtime United Arab Emirates climate diplomat who worked as director-general of last year’s COP28, told me. “It is a slow process by nature, but the problem is, we don’t have that time.” |
