In stark contrast to his predecessor at the World Bank, the new president is a warrior in the cause of confronting climate change.
Australia, in the words of the World Bank’s president, Ajay Banga, is “God’s country”. But he’s pleased that he took his family to see the Great Barrier Reef in the 1990s, before chronic coral bleaching set in.
In stark contrast to his predecessor at the World Bank, Banga is a warrior in the cause of confronting climate change. The bank, together with the International Monetary Fund, was born of the Bretton Woods conference between the Western allies in the 1940s that designed the institutional architecture of the postwar world. One of the system’s unwritten conventions is that the US appoints the head of the World Bank, charged with lifting the poorest nations out of poverty.
His visit to Australia next week also will take him to the Pacific island states, some of which are frontline victims of rising sea levels. With encouragement from Australian ministers, he’ll be the first World Bank chief to visit Fiji in 50 years and the first ever to visit tiny Tuvalu, population 10,000.
But is it already too late? The new Australian treaty with Tuvalu embodies an unspoken resignation to the fearful fragility of the most exposed nations. The Falepili Union, which took effect on Wednesday, commits Australia to the defence of Tuvalu but also provides for a slow-motion national evacuation, the first treaty of its kind.
So is it winnable? He cites the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: “It will tell you that even if we do the energy transition right … we still have to get right heavy-metals manufacturing – you know, steel, copper, all that is very heavy, energy-intensive. We have to get heavy transport right. After all, trucks, ships, airplanes, all use fossil fuels.
“So my belief is that we’re not yet at a point where we’ve lost,” says Banga, but “we are at a point where the public debate must go on scientific basis, and acknowledge some harsh realities of how we need to get this through the next few years.”
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