World Bank picks Indonesia into climate change legion

The World Bank has included Indonesia into a list of six countries to be involved in the multi-billion dollar-cost climate change battle, expecting to reduce the world’s emission regardless of the US President Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric against such an issue.

At a press conference before the Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim pointed out that climate change mitigation and adaptation projects would continue to be a priority.

He said Indonesia, China, India, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Vietnam were joined to work on the worlds’ carbon emission reduction programs through multiple efforts which involve the private sector.

“If we can change the incentives and the way that financing for energy works in those six countries, we can potentially have a huge impact on how much carbon we put in the air. We call this our ‘following the carbon’ initiative. We have to make progress in these six countries,” Kim said during the Spring Meetings on Thursday.

Those countries are known to contribute significant coal-based carbon to the atmosphere among the developing countries and emerging economies. However, coal main markets from the advanced economies, such as the US and Australia, are left untouched.

Climate change, which has become one of the World Bank’s main issues to address, has had its most serious opposition in the last decades after Trump helmed the world’s biggest economy with his anti ‘climate change’ rhetoric raised even before he took office.

On Nov. 6, 2012, Trump tweeted: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive."

Once claiming title as the world’s largest carbon emitter—but now the second behind China, the US is the World Bank’s largest shareholder. Trump’s administration has repeatedly said that it could withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate which has now been signed by 143 countries.

However, Kim said the World Bank would not backpedal on its mission as the institution would lose its credibility if the commitment on climate change revoked. He asserted that the Bank had “no interest in destroying particular industries” and the Bank must remain an “evidence-based organization.”

“We’re not changing what we're doing. In fact, we’re doing everything to accelerate it. We’re trying to work on all platforms involving multiple different players who concern about the meeting, to connect each other to make it works,” he said.

Asked about how Trump administration’s denial of climate change and the White House’s refusal to financially contribute to international action on the issue could weaken his effort, Kim said that he was working on new climate financing effort.

“The Green Climate Fund [GCF] is still at around US$7.5 billion after two or three years, and the estimation was that there would be many, many more billions of dollars in that. So we’re using this meeting to bring all of the leaders together to come up with a new plan. We’re going to put on the table a different kind of platform, where all the different groups that are trying to have an impact on climate can work together to put the financing tools together,” he said.

Since July 9, 2015, the World Bank has been accredited as an implementing entity with intermediary functions to the GCF, which is designed to help developing countries finance clean energy, other mitigation efforts and adaptation to climate change.

It has been transferring GCF grants to several projects and clients in the world and blending GCF funds with its own resources or other third party financing.

In the 2017 Spring Meetings, the World Bank held a number of events focused specifically on climate change, featuring climate advocates including former Vice President Al Gore and the UN Environment Program Director Erik Solheim.

Participants in the World Bank-IMF sessions would also discuss means for connecting public and private partnership to combat climate change.

Besides climate change, Kim and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, discussed the need to make sure that the economic growth reaches all sectors of society and will not harm the future generation.

“We need to have equitable growth within countries, across countries and between generations,” said Lagarde.