Owen Klinsky
Contributor
Up to $41 billion of the funds distributed to climate causes by the World Bank between 2017 and 2023 are unaccounted for due to poor accounting standards, according to an audit from Oxfam International published Thursday.
The enormous sum represents almost 40% of the climate funds the Bank disbursed during the seven year time period, with World Bank data failing to show the recipients and uses of the money, the Oxfam investigation found. (RELATED: Biden’s World Bank Head Promises To Spend ‘As Much As We Possibly Can’ On Climate Change)
“The Bank is quick to brag about its climate finance billions — but these numbers are based on what it plans to spend, not on what it actually spends once a project gets rolling,” Kate Donald, head of Oxfam International’s Washington D.C. Office, said in the release. “This is like asking your doctor to assess your diet only by looking at your grocery list, without ever checking what actually ends up in your fridge.”
CARDIFF, WALES – JULY 11: A close-up of an Oxfam store sign on July 11, 2023 in Cardiff, Wales. (Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images)
The auditors were unable to determine whether the climate cash was spent “on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy,” according to Oxfam.
The World Bank is the largest provider of environmental funding of all multi-national financial institutions, Oxfam reported, and plans to allocate 45% of its annual financing to green initiatives between July 1, 2024, and June 20, 2025. The U.S. is the largest shareholder in the Bank, holding over 15% of its voting shares as of May 31.
“Climate finance is scarce, and yes, we know it’s hard to deliver. But not tracking how or where the money actually gets spent? That’s not just some bureaucratic oversight — it’s a fundamental breach of trust that risks derailing the progress we need to make at COP this year,” Donald said in the release.
The World Bank’s poor record-keeping practices made performing the audit “painstaking and difficult,” Oxfam reported.
“We had to sift through layers of complex and incomplete reports, and even then, the data was full of gaps and inconsistencies,” Donald said in the release. “The fact that this information is so hard to access and understand is alarming —it shouldn’t take a team of professional researchers to figure out how billions of dollars meant for climate action are being spent. This should be transparent and accessible to everyone, most importantly communities who are meant to benefit from climate finance.”
Oxfam and the World Bank did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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And people wonder why so much money is thrown at elections. Back of the envelope using published estimates they are going to drop a couple grand per undecided voter here in MT in just the Senate race. Probably going to be 100-150 million in PAC money for our one million and change souls. Was watching clueless Davos types including the World Bank pres having a panel discussion about saving us from the climate on Bloomberg. They do not care what the populace thinks at all.
When your political system not only allows bribery, but actively encourages it, this is inevitable.
If Trump is elected and brings in Elon Musk, the UN and World Bank Budget should be $0 and then they should ask for a refund of unspent funds.
Trump should also terminate “donations” to the UNFCCC, the UN COP, and the IPCC.
Giving or lending or backing loans for them is a poor use of our resources. If it were up to me I would cut them off permanently. But if some think they have some value I would reconsider after they accounted for all of their money and could satisfy honest auditors that they have a good system. Even then they would only be eligible for about half the money they handle now.
Back in the 90’s, Canadian PM Jean Cretien offered to accede to “First Nations” demands to wind up the Indian Affairs Dept and give the money directly to their “governing body”. The catch was, he demanded EXTERNAL AUDIT as a condition. Needless to say, the proposal was rejected.
I promise to be completely shocked when I learn Hunter Biden is on the board of some no-profit green company receiving some portion of those billions.
‘are unaccounted for due to poor accounting standards,’ Correction: “are unaccounted for due to outright corruption”
“it shouldn’t take a team of professional researchers to figure out how billions of dollars meant for climate action are being spent. This should be transparent and accessible to everyone, most importantly communities who are meant to benefit from climate finance.”
Absolutely not! Most importantly, it should be transparent to those of us who are actually providing these funds!
Hey, a few billion here, a few billion there… just rounding errors. Could happen to anyone.
$41 Billion
Is that all? I bet it’s worse than….
Given the way that foreign aid funds are spent, everybody at every stage of the money travelling from the donor to the final recipient tends to take a “commission”. Sometimes there are so many stages in the money transfer that there is no money left for the intended recipient. Why would climate aid money be any different?
[Charity -] It’s big money. Big salaries and even better, unpaid volunteers.
As most of them advertise, just £2, £3, £5 etc per month can.. [help to stop whatever it is they happen to be plugging from happening] and Unicef recently ran an ad asking for a £36 donation. They know their target audience, don’t they?
Samaritan’s Purse appears to be very honest. One out of many corrupt others.
small potatoes for the Pentagon
Oxfam investigation??
Whilst I have no doubt the Oxfam team are on to the core issue i.e. big money being thrown away without adequate knowledge of where it all ends up. I can’t help thinking this is a classic, pot calling the kettle black situation.
An NGO, UN agency etc. provides perfect cover for predators. Oxfam’s history in places like Haiti is appalling.
It’s dead easy for that sort of money to get lost, During the Covid pandemic the UK government spent £37 billion (US $48 billion) on a track-and-trace computer system that never worked properly and was later abandoned. No-one has yet managed to explain where all that money went and no-one seems to be accountable.
I checked behind the fridge and down the back of the sofa. I found 35p
IIRC, the guy who lead the track-and-trace project later went on to head the Post Office for a while. And made a pretty cr*p job of both…
All that money – or certainly most of it – is most likely in the off-shore bank accounts of shell companies controlled by various politicians and plutocrats involved in spending it. No one cares where it ends up when they’re spending other people’s money.
In Canada, the auditor general reported about $60 million spent (it might be $85 million) on an app called “ArriveCan”. Actual amount is unknown because cost tracking by the contract originator, Canada border services agency, was poorly implemented (or was smartly obfuscated?) It was originally budgeted at $86K, (sole sourced without a proposal, apparently contractors could go over budget by a factor of 1000 without bothering to tell anyone except on their invoices which obody was keeping track of).
The original purpose of the app was to simply allow people arriving in Canada at airports and border crossings to enter basic age, address and vaccination information on their smartphone by modifying an existing standard credit card record database. This modification of the existing paperwork was to save postage and courier charges for the bundles of paper that get collected at border entry points every day.
However troubles were magnified greatly by serious consideration of what a “risky” undertaking this was… Security of the data from prying eyes…earthquake proof backup data…what’s the best encryption money can buy?…how much does it cost to keep the data in a salt mine….stuff like that….far beyond the needs of lowly credit card company data bases apparently. About $25 million went to a 2 man company called GC Strategies to simply get bids from various website companies to do the other $60 million or so of work.
Up to $12 million may have been spent on things other than the ArriveCan app but are “unknown”. The 2 partners who received $25 million were called to be witnesses at a parliamentary hearing, but couldn’t remember any details of who got what amounts. Hmmm, how extensive can the monthly bank statements of a 2 man company be ? And it turns out these two guys already had full time consulting contracts with the Department of National defence. It’s developed an Iran-contra tinge, but Occam’s razor suggests….
Oink Oink goes the World Bank. When you abuse something, you should lose it.
Meanwhile in Oz energy giant AGL is getting mighty nervous about a change of Govt and a switch to nukes cutting off their gravy train and stranding some assets-
AGL pushes for bipartisan backing on 2030 clean energy goals (msn.com)
Bipartisanship with Labor backing the Opposition with nukes not exactly what you had in mind AGL?
Funny how the word “bipartisan” ALWAYS seems to means …. everybody do what we tell you to do. !
“The World Bank’s poor record-keeping practices made performing the audit “painstaking and difficult,” Oxfam reported.”
Proper accounting methods have been around for centuries. I took a few accounting courses in college- didn’t like it enough to major in it- but I understood how well it can track every penny if you just do it. Not rocket science.
This is the age of vague.
Defining vague as lying, I agree.
Where there are troughs, there will be pigs.
[from Wikipedia]
Oxfam is a British-founded confederation of 21 independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs), focusing on the alleviation of global poverty, founded in 1942 and led by Oxfam International.[3] It began as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in Oxford, UK, in 1942, to alleviate World War Two related hunger …
” Oxfam International”: In 2009–10, it had about 77 staff … an operating budget of US$8.7M.
” … with World Bank data failing to show the recipients and uses of the money,”
In the real world, these “World Bank” operators would be tried, convicted and thrown in jail.
The way the funds are allocated is a problem. Instead of earmarking for specific items the funds are given to organizations that promise to deliver to goals instead of naming projects that can be quantified. “Saving the world” covers a lot of virtue signaling ground where buying 100 pumps for water starved villages at $x per pump installed with a well hole and piping is more precise and can be audited.
Hmm, how many African leaders have brand new Bugattis?
What a place to work for. Are they hiring outsiders?
I suspect this confusion is due to deliberate criminal accounting. The World Bank is one of those international institutions that believes it is beyond all laws, and generally is so because of international agreements. The only way to improve it I can see is for something like the major donor(s) to demand it adopt and practice standard accounting practices and cut donations by at least 50% until it is clear that the bank has done so. Otherwise make another 50% cut for each year that it hasn’t cleaned up its practices as assured by a yearly audit that continues each year even once the bank is squeaky clean.