Climate and environmental crisis: Sorcerer’s apprentices at the World Bank and the IMF
23 December 2020
by
In December 2020, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the signature of the Paris Agreement on Climate, the UN General Secretary sounded the alarm because the situation has fundamentally worsened. In this article we analyze what the World Bank and the IMF have done in connection with the environmental crisis and climate change.
At the end of October 2006 Nicholas Stern, Adviser to the Government on the economics of climate change and development, handed Prime Minister Tony Blair a 500 page report on the consequences of the current climate change and measures to counteract this trend. In his report Nicholas Stern writes: “Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world - access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms." [1] Implicitly the diagnosis suggested in the report is a condemnation of policies implemented by the IMF and the WB, where Nicholas Stern was Chief Economist. [2]