Former World Bank employee blames the Bank for damaging the Planet

My former employers, the World Bank, are damaging the planet and punishing the poor: Robert Goodland
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How to aid destruction

I worked as environmental adviser for the World Bank Group, headquartered in Washington, for 23 years. I joined because I believed the bank wanted to improve the lot of the poor and conserve the environment. Before going to Washington I did an environmental study for the government of Tucurui, the first big dam in Amazonia. A vast part of the forest was flooded, so I saw at first hand the huge environmental and social cost of misguided development projects.

The bank knew how impassioned I was but hired me none the less. I thought I would work with colleagues to prevent blunders in the future. Indeed, we achieved a lot. Perhaps our greatest feat was having the bank adopt a suite of social and environmental policies to be applied to all projects.
The bank also adopted policies for reducing poverty directly, instead of relying on "trickle-down" economics. In 2000 I was thrilled when James Wolfensohn, then president of the bank, led it to pursue the UN's Millennium Development Goals. Assessing risks and impacts, we failed to stop the bank funding ExxonMobil's oil pipeline in Chad and Cameroon, but managed to prevent it supporting China's Three Gorges dam.

Progress faltered in the late 90s. Most social and environmental policies were gutted, and those that remain are no longer being rigorously followed. During the Wolfowitz presidency, policy work on the two key challenges of population and climate change was crippled. While governments around the world are regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, the bank is not yet doing anything like this. The bank has encouraged India to resume investing in coal and nuclear energy. Social and environmental policies have been handed over to developing countries to implement - or not, as the case may be. The bank's private sector affiliate, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), is backing oil palm plantations in Indonesia and cutting protective mangrove forests. Among the worst is financing for monoculture soya plantations in Amazonia, even though soya is suicide for Brazil's rich agricultural lands.

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