Multilateral development banks claim to have handed out a record $125 billion in “climate finance” in 2023. However, a recent report finds that some of the funds went to “problematic projects.” “The development banks’ climate finance figures should be read with great caution,” Petra Kjell Wright, campaigns manager at Recourse, a Netherlands-based nonprofit that published the report, said in a statement. “We found financing for projects involving fossil fuels, human rights violations, and environmental destruction.” The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), for example, classified more than 91% of their funding to the Greater Malé waste-to-energy project in the Maldives — which burns trash to produce energy — as “climate finance,” despite criticisms over its impacts on local communities and emissions of hazardous fumes and greenhouse gases, the report found. Similarly, the World Bank, AIIB and ADB classified most of their funding to Nepal’s Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project as climate finance, although the dam’s development “has marginalised and adversely affected Indigenous peoples in several critical ways,” the report noted. The ADB also counts 100% of its investment into a project in Mongolia aiming to mine minerals for renewable energy as “climate finance.” Yet more than 60 civil society groups have raised health, economic, pollution and land-grabbing concerns about the project, in addition to Indigenous rights violations. One problem with “climate finance,” the report noted, is that there’s no universally accepted definition for it. “[This] means that what counts as climate finance can include activities that…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post $125b in ‘climate finance’ funds polluting, rights-violating projects: Report first appeared on EnviroLink Network.