World Bank’s new climate roadmap for South Asia

It aims to work with individual gov]ts, private sector to make the South Asian region more climate resilient

Due to decades of financing environmentally damaging projects around the world, the World Bank has come under increasing pressure to ‘green’ its lending portfolio. More recently, the World Bank has been trying to pay more attention to the environment. It has just prepared an ambitious climate roadmap for South Asia as well, which is a climate hotspot and home to nearly a quarter of the world’s population.

This newly formulated climate roadmap is meant to guide how the World Bank will support South Asia in contending with climate threats over the next five years. This roadmap itself does not focus on enabling much needed transborder cooperation to contend with the challenges of managing pollution or sharing under-threat waterways that traverse hotly contested borders. Instead, it aims to work with individual governments and the private sector to make the South Asian region more climate resilient.

The need to contend with climate change across all South Asian countries is obvious. The lives of nearly half the people in the region are estimated to have been affected by climate change over the past two decades, ranging from droughts, floods, cyclones, water scarcity — and these impacts are becoming worse. Emissions are also on the rise in South Asia due to a continued reliance on coal, especially due to India, which is now the third largest emitter in the world and is responsible for nearly 80% of the region’s overall emissions. Pakistan too has invested in coal powered plants under CPEC, and it remains keen to continue exploiting its Thar coal reserves.

To address climate related problems, the World Bank wants to help finance the shift to investing in renewables and making public transportation more efficient. It also wants to harness greater resources for additional climate adaptation efforts including early warning systems and efforts to make infrastructure more climate resilient. The World Bank also aims to accelerate climate-responsive social protection measures to build the resilience of vulnerable people via job training and income diversification. While all these objectives seem desirable and relevant, the devil often lies in the details.

Let’s take a closer look at the World Bank’s intent to invest in climate-smart agriculture. The World Bank has a long but troubled history of trying to support rural poverty alleviation and agricultural development. The so-called ‘Green Revolution’, of which the World Bank was an assertive supporter, increased agricultural productivity significantly but it did so at a significant cost. Boosting agricultural productivity by using chemicals and more extensive irrigation ended up wreaking ecological havoc. The benefits of such agricultural growth were also confined to larger and mid-level farmers across South Asia, who could invest in expensive agri-inputs and mechanisation. Conversely, use of capital-intensive strategies displaced many landless farmers, such as sharecroppers, leading many of them to migrate to already burgeoning cities. Whether the new climate-inspired World Bank attempt to use market mechanisms to not only address climate change but simultaneously help the rural poor in South Asia will produce any better results remains to be seen.

The World Bank wants to contend with the water stress problem as well, especially in the agricultural sector. Nearly 90 per cent of the available freshwater in South Asia is used in agriculture, so the currently inefficient use of water within this sector is indeed a big problem. Yet, the World Bank again wants to use market principles such as rationalising water and energy subsidies and grain price guarantees to address this problem. It argues that agricultural subsidies facilitate groundwater depletion and an over-reliance on diesel to pump water for irrigation. Removal of elite captured subsidies may free up scare state resources, presumably to pay back existing external loans, but such reforms will do little to address the plight of poor and landless farmers across South Asia.

Despite its lofty claims, it is feared that the World Bank’s promotion of market-driven strategies to contend with climate change will transfer the costs of contending with climate change onto the shoulders of the poor, who are already facing the brunt of climate changes which they did little to cause.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 17^th, 2021.

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