The World Bank on Monday announced $200 billion (Rs 13.95 lakh crore) towards climate action investment for 2021-2025 as representatives from nearly 200 nations converged in Poland’s Katowice on Sunday for the United Nations’ annual climate change conference, AFP reported. The $200 billion is double the World Bank’s current five-year investment on climate action.
“Climate change is an existential threat to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim in a statement. “These new targets demonstrate how seriously we are taking this issue, investing and mobilising $200 billion over five years to combat climate change.”
Jim urged the global community to “do more and to go faster on climate”. “This is about putting countries and communities in charge of building a safer, more climate-resilient future.”
The World Bank said the $200 billion would comprise approximately $100 billion in direct finance from the bank and the remaining funding will come from two World Bank Group agencies and private capital “mobilised by the World Bank Group”.
“If we don’t reduce emissions and build adaptation now, we’ll have 100 million more people living in poverty by 2030,” World Bank Senior Director for Climate Change John Roome told AFP. “And we also know that the less we address this issue proactively just in three regions – Africa, South Asia and Latin America – we’ll have 133 million climate migrants.”
UN climate talks
The United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP 24 is a two-week conference to define how the 2015 Paris Agreement will be implemented by its signatories. Under the 2015 agreement, countries had committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit the global average rise in temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius.
Poland’s Deputy Environment Minister Michal Kurtyka, who is chairing the conference, urged envoys to make progress on fleshing out the 2015 Paris agreement. “We are here to enable the world to act together on climate change,” AP quoted him as saying. “The United Nations secretary-general is counting on us, all of us to deliver. There is no Plan B.”
On Saturday, 19 economies at the G20 summit affirmed their commitment to the Paris accord. The United States was the only country at the G20 that did not provide a commitment since it had withdrawn from the 2015 Paris accord in June 2017.
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