10 Billion Dollar of World Bank Finance - Pushing Africa's Fossil-fueled Development

In December 2015, 195 countries adopted the Paris Climate Agreement with a commitment to limit global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to make financial flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas (GHG) development. Well before the Paris Agreement, the World Bank Group (WBG)2 had already committed to help countries onto a low-GHG development path and avoid exceeding a 2°C warmer world. In 2013, the WBG committed to end assistance for coal power plants. Most recently in December 2017, the WBG announced that it will no longer finance upstream oil and gas after 2019 (see Figure 1 for upstream oil and gas). Despite these WBG climate commitments, a review of Bank operations across Africa shows that the WBG’s energy portfolio is far from a low-GHG development path.