WASHINGTON — Despite the current global financial storm, rich
countries are resolved to keep up funding to help developing nations combat
climate change, a top World Bank environment official said on Tuesday.
Countries that have pledged to donate a total of $6.1 billion
to the bank’s newly created Climate Investment Funds are "very resolute," said
Kathy Sierra, the international lending organization’s vice president for
sustainable development.
"They are going to continue to support these types of
activities because they see both a short-term and a long-term implication,"
Sierra told reporters at a meeting of the funds’ donor and recipient countries
in Washington.
That was in line with World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s
remarks at the end of a meeting of world finance and development ministers on
Sunday.
"I think one of the lessons of today’s crisis is you have to
get ahead of these things, and so there is no doubt that climate change is a
problem today and will be a problem tomorrow," Zoellick said. "And so, what we
are trying to do at the Bank is to ... catch up and then get ahead of it."
Sierra said it was unclear whether such funds would continue
to flow into the private sector, and said this could become more challenging in
the future.
However, she said, one consequence of the present financial
crisis could be to spur demand for environmentally sound development as a way to
cut costs.
"I suspect there will be even more demand, because many of
the solutions for the real economy will start looking for opportunities to
decrease costs and become more efficient," she said. "So energy efficiency, for
example, is going to be even more important going forward."
The climate investment fund is meant to help developing
countries put larger-scale, environmentally sustainable projects in place as the
world negotiates how to curb greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, when the first
phase of the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol expires.
These negotiations are taking place through the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, with a meeting set for Poznan,
Poland, in December. The negotiations are set to conclude at a meeting in
Copenhagen in 2009.
Sierra said Mexico is expected to be one of the funds’ first
partners in environmental programs, saying this country has been "a great
intellectual leader (with) ... a very strong climate change strategy."
Earlier, Mexico’s environment minister, Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada, told the
meeting, "As the current financial crisis unfolds, a plausible fear exists that
the bailout of financial institutions will draw all attention and necessary
resources away from climate change mitigation. In other words, in order to
address what is urgent, we fail to address what is important."
