The Line 5 oil pipeline that snakes through Wisconsin and Michigan won a key permit this month: pending federal studies and approvals, Canada-based Enbridge Energy will build a new section of pipeline and tunnel underneath the Great Lakes despite widespread Indigenous opposition. You may not have heard of Line 5, but over the next few years, the controversy surrounding the 645-mile pipeline is expected to intensify. 

The 70-year-old pipeline stretches from Superior, Wisconsin, through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario, transporting up to 540,000 gallons of oil and natural gas liquids per day. It’s part of a network of more than 3,000 miles of pipelines that the company operates throughout the U.S. and Canada, including the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota where hundreds of opponents were arrested or cited in 2021 for protesting construction, including citizens and members of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and White Earth Band of Ojibwe. 

Now, Enbridge Energy, with the support of the Canadian government, is seeking approvals to build a new $500 million conduit to replace an underwater section of Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac, while facing lawsuits backed by dozens of Indigenous nations as well as the state of Michigan.

A key concern is the aging pipeline’s risk to the Great Lakes, which represent more than a fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. Environmental concerns are so great that three years ago, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ordered Enbridge’s dual pipelines that run for 4 miles at the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac to cease operations. 

“The state is revoking the easement for violation of the public trust doctrine, given the unreasonable risk that continued operation of the dual pipelines poses to the Great Lakes,” the governor’s office said at the time. 

The move came just a year after the Bad River Band tribal nation filed a lawsuit against Enbridge regarding another, separate section of Line 5 in Wisconsin located across 12 miles of the Bad River reservation. The pipeline had been installed in 1953 and, at the time, had received easements to do so from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

But the easements expired, and in a court filing, the tribal nation said the company “has continued to operate the pipeline as if it has an indefinite entitlement to do so,” despite federal law that bans the renewal of expired right-of-way permits on Indian land and would require Enbridge to obtain new permits and approvals from the Band. 

The Bad River won a key victory last summer when a Wisconsin judge ruled that the company must shut down the portion of its pipeline that trespasses on the reservation by 2026. 

Enbridge has resisted calls to cease Line 5 operations. Instead, the company contends that it has the right to continue operating there, citing a 1992 agreement with the Band, and is planning to reroute the pipeline while appealing the Wisconsin judge’s decision. The company also argues that building a new pipeline 100 feet below the lake bed through the Straits of Mackinac will virtually eliminate the chance of a spill.

“Line 5 poses little risk to natural and cultural resources, nor does it endanger the way of life of Indigenous communities,” company spokesperson Ryan Duffy said. “Line 5 is operated safely and placing the line in a tunnel well below the lake bed at the Straits of Mackinac will only serve to make a safe pipeline safer.”

To that end, Enbridge successfully appeared before the Michigan Public Service Commission, the state’s top energy regulator, this month and got permission to build a new concrete tunnel beneath the channel connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The commission cited the need for the light crude oil and natural gas liquids that the pipeline transports, and said other alternatives like driving, trucking or hauling by barge or rail would increase the risk of a spill. 

The commission’s approval contradicts Governor Whitmer’s efforts to shut down the pipeline. In the wake of the permit, the governor’s office told reporters the state commission is “independent.” Both of the governor’s appointees on the board voted in favor of the permit. 

The approval doesn’t mean that the project will proceed, but it is encouraging for the company as it seeks federal clearance. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in the process of putting together a draft environmental impact statement for the project. That document isn’t expected to be published until spring 2025. 

In the meantime, Line 5 has gotten lots of support from the government of Canada, where Enbridge Energy is based. The government has repeatedly invoked a 1977 energy treaty between the U.S. and Canada to defend the pipeline.

That’s frustrating to Indigenous peoples who have seen their treaty rights repeatedly violated. 

“What we’re simply trying to continue to preserve and protect is an Indigenous way of life, which is the same thing our ancestors tried to preserve and protect when they first entered into those treaty negotiations,” said Whitney Gravelle, chairperson of the Bay Mills Indian Community, one of numerous tribal nations opposing Line 5. 

The Straits are also the site of Anishinaabe creation stories, the waters from which the Great Turtle emerged to create Turtle Island, what is currently called North America. Gravelle said that maintaining clean lakes where Indigenous people can fish is about more than just the right to fish. It’s about the continuation of culture.

“It’s about being able to learn from your parents and your elders about what fishing means to your people, whether it be in ceremony or in tradition or in oral storytelling, and then understanding the role that that fish plays in your community,” she said.  

Last summer, José Francisco Calí Tzay, United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, called for suspending the pipeline’s operations “until the free, prior, and informed consent of the Indigenous Peoples affected is secured.” Free, prior, and informed consent is a right guaranteed to Indigenous Peoples under international law that says governments must consult Indigenous nations in good faith to obtain their consent before undertaking projects that affect their land and resources — consent that Bad River, for instance, has refused to give.

“Canada is advocating for the pipeline to continue operations, following the decision of a Parliamentary Committee that did not hear testimony from the affected Indigenous Peoples,” Calí Tzay wrote, adding the country’s support for the pipeline contradicts its international commitments to mitigate climate change in addition to the risk of a “catastrophic spill.”

Part of what makes Line 5 such a flashpoint is the importance of the Great Lakes and Enbridge’s spotty environmental record. As the Guardian reported last month, the Great Lakes “stretch out beyond horizons, collectively covering an area as large as the U.K. and providing drinking water for a third of all Canadians and one in 10 Americans.” 

In 2010, two separate pipelines run by Enbridge ruptured, spilling more than a million gallons of oil between them into rivers in Michigan and Illinois. The Environmental Protection Agency found that Enbridge was at fault not only for failing to upkeep the pipeline but also for restarting the pipeline after alarms went off without checking whether it failed. The company eventually reached a $177 million settlement with federal regulators over the disaster.

A 2017 National Wildlife Federation analysis found that Line 5 has leaked more than a million gallons on 29 separate occasions. The company said just five of these instances were outside of Enbridge facilities, and that no spills have occurred in the Straits of Mackinac or on the Bad River Reservation. Still, the section of the pipeline on the floor of the Straits of Mackinac has been dented by boat anchors dropped in the lakes, including from Enbridge-contracted vessels.

Despite Indigenous peoples’ concerns, Line 5 continues to gain momentum, in part because of the amount of energy it supplies to the U.S. and Canada and the countries’ continued dependence on fossil fuels. While the international community agreed to curb fossil fuels this month at COP28, there’s no agreed-upon timeline for actually doing so, and the consumer demand for affordable energy remains high, especially in light of inflation driving the prices of food and housing.

Meanwhile, more than 60 tribal nations, including every federally recognized tribe in Michigan, have said the pipeline poses “an unacceptable risk of an oil spill into the Great Lakes.” 

“The Straits of Mackinac are a sacred wellspring of life and culture for tribal nations in Michigan and beyond,” the nations wrote in an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit challenging the pipeline.

To Gravelle from the Bay Mills Indian Community, the issue is deeply personal and goes beyond maintaining access to clean water and the ability to fish safely. Fishing is deeply intertwined with her peoples’ culture. When a baby is born, their first meal is fish, and when her people hold traditional ceremonies, they serve fish. 

“Our traditions and who we are as a people are all wrapped up into what we do with fish,” Gravelle said. “Our relationship with the land and water is more important than any commercial value that could ever be realized from an oil pipeline.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why more than 60 Indigenous nations oppose the Line 5 oil pipeline on Dec 20, 2023.

As flooding becomes more common due to the shifting and strengthening weather patterns and sea-level rise associated with climate change, so does climate migration.

New research by the First Street Foundation (FSF) has combined historic population change trends with flood risk data to reveal climate migration patterns happening in areas with high flood risk across the United States.

“Much of the world’s population is exposed to some kind of extreme weather event exacerbated by climate change. These events have been directly connected to impacts on human systems including economic, social, and political crises,” the authors of the study wrote. “Increasing flood exposure and losses are expected to drive population and demographic shifts in the U.S. Some projections estimate that globally, up to 216 million people may migrate due to climate change by 2050.”

The study emphasizes “Climate Abandonment Areas” — areas with population decreases between 2000 and 2020 that can be directly linked to flood risk related to climate change, a press release from FSF said.

The researchers put together population data from the 2020 U.S. Census with the Census Block — property specific data on flood risk from FSF. “Tipping points” were revealed where population change was directly impacted by high flood risk thresholds.

There are 113 million people who live in parts of the country where housing choices have already been affected by flood risk, the most extreme being Climate Abandonment Areas. These areas account for more than 818,000 Census Blocks and lost a total of 3.2 million-plus residents due to flooding from 2000 to 2020.

“There appears to be clear winners and losers in regard to the impact of flood risk on neighborhood level population change,” said Dr. Jeremy Porter, FSF’s head of climate implications research and a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, in the press release. “[T]he downstream implications of this are massive and impact property values, neighborhood composition, and commercial viability both positively and negatively.”

The study, “Integrating climate change induced flood risk into future population projections,” was published in the journal Nature Communications.

“This research is the first to find a systematic pattern in the historic population change data that shows climate migration is not something that will happen in the future, but it’s something that is already happening in the case of the most likely type of migration (local moves),” Porter told Axios.

In the next three decades, current Climate Abandonment Areas are predicted to lose 2.5 million more residents — an additional 16 percent — due to flood risk. Along with those declines, areas with high flood risk that are still seeing net population growth are projected to experience net population loss later on and become Climate Abandonment Areas.

“[T]he people that can afford to leave, leave, and people [who] can’t afford to leave end up staying in the community,” Porter said, as reported by The Hill. “You end up with a lot of vulnerable populations at risk.”

Emerging Climate Abandonment Areas are expected to reach the risk tipping point soon, eventually losing a total of five million residents — 24 percent of their population — by 2053.

“The population exposure over the next 30 years is a serious concern,” said Evelyn Shu, lead author of the paper and a FSF senior research analyst, in the press release. “For decades we’ve chosen to build and develop in areas that we believed did not have significant risk, but due to the impacts of climate change, those areas are very rapidly beginning to look like areas we’ve avoided in the past.”

The post Americans Abandoning Neighborhoods Due to Rising Flood Risk, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Biden administration has announced a proposal to conserve and restore old-growth trees in United States national forests.

If adopted, the proposal would expand logging restrictions as part of an executive order issued on Earth Day 2022 to safeguard national forests. The protections would be a natural remedy for tackling the effects of climate change, press releases from The White House and the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) said.

“Old and mature forests are vital to providing clean water, absorbing carbon pollution, and supplying habitat for wildlife. Today’s actions include a first-of-its kind proposal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to amend all 128 forest land management plans across the country to conserve and restore old-growth forests across the National Forest System,” The White House said.

The amount of carbon dioxide U.S. forests absorb is equal to more than 10 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

The new proposal, which adds to the over 26 million acres of waters and lands that have already been protected by the administration, will direct the U.S. Forest Service in its restoration and conservation efforts.

“Protecting our old-growth trees from logging is an important first step to ensure these giants continue to store vast amounts of carbon, but other older forests also need protection,” said Randi Spivak, CBD’s public lands policy director, in the CBD press release. “To fulfill President Biden’s executive order and address the magnitude of the climate crisis, the Forest Service also needs to protect our mature forests, which if allowed to grow will become the old growth of tomorrow.”

Most old-growth forests in the U.S. have already been destroyed by logging, and most remaining ancient trees are on public lands managed by the federal government. The Climate Forests Campaign has identified at least 370,000 acres of old-growth and mature forests on federal lands that have been earmarked for timber sales.

Old-growth forests sequester enormous amounts of carbon and are especially resilient to wildfires.

“Americans love our forests. They’re natural playgrounds for people and wildlife alike. That’s why more than half a million people this summer asked the Forest Service to protect mature and old-growth trees and forests,” said Ellen Montgomery, Environment America’s public lands campaign director, in the press release from CBD.

The U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management manage approximately 80 million mature forest acres and 32 million old-growth acres located on federal lands. Mature forests represent 45 percent of all forests managed by these two federal agencies, with old-growth forests making up 18 percent of the total.

“Mature and old-growth forests are an essential component of a broader climate-crisis solution — but only if we protect them from logging,” said Adam Rissien, WildEarth Guardians rewilding manager, in the CBD press release. “Today’s announcement by the Forest Service establishes necessary and long-overdue protections for old growth forests, limiting when they can be cut and sold commercially. Taking the next step and developing a national rule covering both mature and old-growth would deliver on the Biden administration’s commitment to protect these trees once and for all.”

In addition to the updated amendment to the national forest plan, the Northwest Forest Plan to improve climate resilience for old-growth and mature forest ecosystems will be updated by the Forest Service for the first time since 2007, The White House press release said. Started in 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan provides management guidance for federally owned forests in Oregon, Washington and California. These ancient forests contain approximately a quarter of the national forest system’s remaining old-growth trees in the contiguous 48 states.

“The administration has rightly recognized that protecting America’s mature and old-growth trees and forests must be a core part of America’s conservation vision and playbook to combat the climate crisis,” said NRDC senior attorney Garett Rose in the press release from CBD. “This announcement is an important step toward meeting these goals. The Forest Service should move forward to develop the strongest possible safeguards for these forests.”

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According to a new analysis by Travel Smart, a campaign by the European Federation for Transport and Environment, about half of over 200 global business firms reduced their business-related travel emissions by over 50% from 2019 to 2022. Much of this reduction in emissions could be attributed to less air travel since the pandemic.

The Travel Smart campaign analyzed travel of 217 global firms from 2019 to 2022. Of the total firms analyzed, 104 were found to reduce travel emissions by at least 50%, in part thanks to virtual meetings that reduced the need for corporate travel amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The analysis found that tech company SAP had the greatest reduction in travel emissions, about 86%, followed by Pfizer with a 78% reduction and PwC with a decline in emissions of about 76%.

On average, business travel emissions for these global firms declined by about 51% from 2019 to 2022, according to the findings.

“Overall it’s a positive picture to see so many companies not returning to pre-2019 levels of flying. Lessons from the pandemic have been learnt: the way forward is collaboration with more online meetings, more travel by train and less by plane,” Denise Auclair, Travel Smart campaign manager, said in a statement.

The European Federation for Transport and Environment noted that business travel emissions need to decline by 50% during this decade compared to pre-pandemic levels to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the target set by the Paris Agreement to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change.

While many companies met and surpassed this goal so far, 113 companies did not cut emissions by half, according to the campaign. The Travel Smart analysis said that JP Morgan Chase had a 13% decline in business travel emissions compared to 2019 levels, followed by Merck at a 17% decline and Johnson & Johnson at a 28% decline. 

Twenty-one of the 113 companies even ended up with higher travel-related emissions than pre-pandemic levels, including L3Harris, Boston Scientific and Marriott International, the analysis said.

Had these 113 companies cut business travel emissions by half, the Travel Smart campaign said they could have saved over 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

However, Boston Scientific refuted the findings, telling Reuters, “It reflects the company’s Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) disclosure for business travel prior to Boston Scientific receiving approval of its net-zero, science-based scopes 1, 2 and 3 targets.”

Although global firms have seen an average 50% decline in travel-related emissions since 2019, the Smart Travel campaign is urging the 171 of 217 studied firms that don’t have reduction targets to set a goal to limit emissions by 50% or more. The European Federation for Transport and Environment estimated that aviation emissions could increase by 38% from 2019 to 2050 without technology improvements, more efficient fuels, regulations, and a decline in air travel.

“The era of uncontrolled business flying is coming to an end. Governments are taking notice and cracking down on unnecessary flights. This makes sense for the planet but also for the businesses themselves, who can cut costs and prioritise the well-being of their employees,” Auclair said.

The post Nearly Half of Global Business Firms Reduced Travel Emissions by at Least 50% Since 2019, Analysis Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

CO2 emissions are warming the planet more every year, contributing to longer, more dangerous wildfire…

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Over the course of its 75-year history, the World Bank has been the go-to organization for solving global crises: It was charged with rebuilding Europe after the Second World War, and then again with reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan after they were invaded by the U.S. During the global economic downturn of the 1970s, it loaned poor countries millions of dollars with the stated purpose of ending third world poverty. And earlier this month, the institution was picked to manage one of the most monumental tasks of the century: dispensing climate reparations to the developing world. 

The World Bank’s role managing this so-called loss-and-damage fund was formalized on the very first day of COP28, this year’s United Nations climate conference, which just concluded in the United Arab Emirates. The fund, which provides a trove of money for relatively poor countries that have emitted little carbon yet disproportionately suffer the effects of climate change, was capitalized with more than $650 million in just a few days after the start of the conference.

But this success came after a string of furious debates, in which representatives from several coastal and low-income nations expressed vehement opposition to the World Bank’s management of the fund. When developing countries finally agreed that the Bank could host the fund on an interim basis for the next four years, they included a long list of conditions that the institution must meet. The deal was struck largely due to attrition, after weeks of negotiations in which wealthy nations, largely led by the U.S., rejected an alternative to set up a standalone fund. 

Grist spoke with former World Bank employees, COP28 negotiators, and watchdog groups to understand the opposition to the World Bank’s role in the unprecedented effort to pay out climate reparations from the new loss-and-damage fund. Experts unanimously agreed that developing countries have little trust in the World Bank as a result of its governing structure, which gives the U.S. outsized influence, as well as the failures of its past programs, which led to debt crises that compounded poverty in many developing nations during the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, the Bank’s track record as a major investor in fossil fuel projects around the world has led some critics to question its fitness for a position meant to battle climate change. 

“The structure of the international organizations [like the World Bank] reflects a global power structure that is no longer the case, no longer true,” said Paul Cadario, a 37-year veteran of the World Bank who is now a distinguished fellow at the University of Toronto. “It doesn’t give sufficient weight to the concerns of the Global South. Those concerns are inevitably going to wash over something as specific as the loss-and-damage fund.”

The World Bank’s primary function is that of a credit institution — a bank like any other. Given its creditworthiness, the bank borrows money at low interest rates, which it then loans to developing nations. It is in part this setup that has sounded alarms among potential loss-and-damage fund recipients: Grantmaking and fund management, two integral components of the loss-and-damage effort, are not core functions of the bank. While the exact extent to which the loss-and-damage funding will take the form of no-strings-attached grants versus interest-bearing loans is unclear, developing nations have argued vehemently against loans that would further trap heavily indebted nations.

The World Bank has gained some relevant experience over the last few decades, as it’s taken responsibility for the management of a handful of funds designed to provide capital to developing countries trying to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to a warming world. As the trustee of these funds, the bank is responsible for fundraising and allocating the money raised. A loss-and-damage fund would likely work the same way: The bank would appeal to various donor countries for funds, which it would then pass on to developing nations for specific projects. 

But the bank has historically been slow to deploy these funds. The Green Climate Fund was established by climate negotiators at COP16 in 2010 to help developing countries tackle the climate crisis. It’s the largest multilateral fund of its kind and has received about $33 billion in pledges so far. But countries in need have had difficulty accessing the money, because project approvals take several years. The Philippines, a low-lying archipelago threatened by sea-level rise and typhoons, had just one of seven projects it proposed over seven years approved in 2021. 

“The process is extremely slow and very bureaucratic,” said Rohit Khanna, a former manager of global energy programs at the World Bank who also helped set up one of the bank’s climate funds. “The Green Climate Fund Secretariat is quite risk averse. The Secretariat is just anxious that if something goes wrong, the fund will die in its infancy.” (The Secretariat is a World Bank employee who manages the day-to-day operations of the fund.)

The highly bureaucratic process is a burden for developing countries, said Michai Robertson, a negotiator for small island states like Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and Barbados. The bank often had lengthy reporting requirements to guard against fraud and corruption, and at times it made well-meaning but impractical information requests, he added. In one case, the bank asked for 30 years of weather data in conflict zones where such data did not exist. Robertson attributed the logjams to “a lack of trust in developing countries and their systems.”

“It’s very colonial in its mindset,” he added.

In exchange for running the funds, the bank charges fees that are primarily used to pay its staff, many of whom live in expensive cities like Washington, D.C., and New York. In recent years, those costs have been increasing. The bank increased its fees from 12 percent to 17 percent, calculated as a percentage of the Secretariat’s operational costs for running the Global Partnership for Education fund a few years ago. More recently, it tried to increase those costs to 24 percent before they were negotiated down to about 20 percent. 

“I don’t think the bank is transparent” about its fee structure, said Khanna. “The bank is not cheap, that’s for sure. The fees are high, and part of it is just the fact that you’re paying for a lot of stuff in Washington, D.C.” Khanna said costs in the low teens for the loss-and-damage fund would be acceptable, but anything as high as 24 percent would be “outrageous.” 

The objection to the World Bank’s involvement in the loss-and-damage fund goes beyond its high fees and bureaucracy. Its critics charge more broadly that the institution has consistently pushed programs that have impoverished vast swaths of the developing world.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were set up in the aftermath of the Second World War. At a two-week conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which was organized by the U.S. and British governments, leaders from 44 countries gathered to find ways to rebuild international currencies sunk by the war and “to promote worldwide reconstruction.” Initially, that meant promoting policies that favored substantial government intervention in the economy. In the decades after its founding, the World Bank encouraged countries in the Global South to take out millions of dollars in loans to dam rivers and erect power stations, assuring them that the new infrastructure would increase export revenue by enabling industrial production and pull their people out of poverty.

That plan did not pan out, according to University of Minnesota professor Michael Goldman, who has written one of the seminal books about the World Bank. While the bank pushed many developing countries to invest in industries that ultimately did not have longevity, rich nations’ hunger for many of the Global South’s key commodities began to dwindle. The commodities that had generated export revenue for developing countries were largely replaced by cheap synthetic alternatives: corn syrup instead of sugar, polyester instead of cotton, particle board instead of timber. As the market value of these commodities plummeted, poor nations’ foreign debt ballooned, reaching $1 trillion by 1986. 

Rather than diminishing the World Bank’s stature, however, the global debt crisis placed the bank in the position of solving the colossal problem that it had a dominant hand in creating. 

Governments in the developing world started borrowing large sums just to pay off the interest on their old loans. But these new loans came at a steep cost: The World Bank was stacked with people who believed that state-led development had failed and a free market approach would benefit indebted nations. As a result, the bank promised to bail out poor countries on the condition that they implement specific economic policies that, while on their face were intended to pull countries out of debt, ultimately served the interests of wealthy northern nations by allowing foreign companies to privatize public sectors.

These 1990s-era “structural adjustment programs,” as they were known, marked a radical departure from the World Bank’s founding ideology. Rather than push for government intervention in developing markets, the bank ordered borrowers to liberalize their economies by eliminating trade restrictions and allowing foreign companies to privatize previously public functions like electricity and mining. In the ensuing decade, people living in the borrowing countries struggled under policies that also saw the elimination of critical government subsidies and social welfare programs. 

“It was considered ‘the lost decade’ because of the austerity programs the World Bank implemented to get back its money to repay its investors,” Goldman told Grist. In Mexico, for example, the government was forced to take out structural adjustment loans after racking up $80 billion in debt to U.S. banks by 1982. Provisions in the loans “completely revamped the Mexican state and economy, eliminating food subsidies, rural public agencies, national food security systems, and state-owned food monopolies,” Goldman wrote in his book, Imperial Nature.

The ideology behind structural adjustment — which promoted market liberalization, state austerity, and public sector privatization — permeated every arm of the World Bank during the 1980s, according to Robert Wade, a professor of political economy at the London School of Economics. When Wade started working at the institution in 1984, he had already lived in Taiwan and South Korea, where government intervention in the economy had improved the prospects of millions of people. At the bank, however, he found that no one was interested in these success stories. He departed four years later, “with the sense that the World Bank was ideologically driven in a direction that I thought was inappropriate for developing countries,” Wade told Grist. 

Structural adjustment is now widely considered a resounding failure among economists and development analysts. Since the turn of the millennium, the World Bank has shifted in new directions, focusing more on promoting good governance and “sustainable development.” But Wade told Grist that, at its core, the institution is still dominated by the perspectives and interests of rich countries. He pointed to the World Bank’s power structure: It is headquartered in Washington, D.C., its president is typically an American citizen handpicked by the U.S. president, and the U.S. is the only country to have a de facto right of veto at the bank. To this day, the U.S. remains the bank’s largest shareholder, providing more capital to the bank than any other country.

According to Jason Hickel, a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona, the average individual in the global South has one-eighth of the voting power in the World Bank as their counterpart in the global North. As a result, the bank’s hosting of the loss-and-damage fund would mean that the countries that have contributed the most to climate change would have the most power to administer the reparations for the harm they have caused.

“They’re playing a double game,” Wade said. “Western nations have a collective interest in pretending that they’re committed to giving money to this fund” while structuring it in a way that minimizes what they actually have to pay. That became clear at COP28 earlier this week, when delegates agreed to adopt a loss-and-damage fund that will start at $429 million — a small fraction of what developing countries say they will need to make up for the economic impacts of climate change. The U.S. in particular came under fire for offering up a paltry $17.5 million. (The United Arab Emirates and Germany, by comparison, each pledged $100 million). The cost of Pakistan’s devastating floods during the summer of 2022 were estimated to be around $40 billion alone.

To protect the loss-and-damage fund from the idiosyncrasies of the World Bank, developing nation negotiators set out some conditions that the bank has to meet. They include autonomy for the board that would oversee the fund, access to the fund for all developing countries, and fees that are “reasonable and appropriate.” 

“What we agreed to was that rather than trying to shove ourselves into existing World Bank structures, we would establish a set of conditions that the World Bank must meet if it is to be the interim host,” said Avinash Persaud, special climate envoy and negotiator for Barbados. “If the World Bank doesn’t do a good job — and I’m not saying it won’t — then sacking the World Bank” is a possibility, he added.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The World Bank is running the first-ever climate reparations fund. Nobody is happy about it. on Dec 19, 2023.

The human body makes its own collagen, but aging causes collagen production to take a…

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