World Bank Spent Billions of Dollars Backing Fossil Fuels in 2022, Study Finds

The World Bank poured billions of dollars into fossil fuels around the world last year despite repeated promises to refocus on shifting to a low-carbon economy, research has suggested. From a report: The money went through a special form of funding known as trade finance, which is used to facilitate global transactions. Urgewald, a campaign group that tracks global fossil fuel finance, found that the World Bank supplied about $3.7bn in trade finance in 2022 that was likely to have ended up funding oil and gas developments. Heike Mainhardt, the author of the research, called for reform of the World Bank and its private finance arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), to make such transactions more transparent and to exclude funding for fossil fuels from its lending. "They can't say that they are aligned with the Paris agreement, because there isn't enough transparency to be able to tell," she said. Fossil fuel companies would take advantage of this, she added. "They can see that they can access public money this way, without drawing attention to themselves, and they're very clever, so they will do this," she told the Guardian. Trade finance is a form of funding more opaque than standard project finance. Whereas project finance usually flows to governments, organisations or consortiums for a particular well-defined purpose and is relatively easy to track, trade finance is more diffuse.

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