The dirty secret of climate finance is that much of it is displacing traditional development aid. Calls for more climate finance are important, but if current practice is any guide, a large share of the funds will be taken from budgets that fund critical development priorities, such as health, educa...

Olu Verheijen from the Nigerian government and Vijaya Ramachandran from the Breakthrough Institute join Gyude to discuss the scale and nature of the energy crisis in Africa, the role that renewable energy can (and can't) play in addressing it, and what steps African countries—and partners—can take t...

On June 14, we published a paper titled “What Counts as Climate?” where we argued that the World Bank has developed a climate portfolio that lacks estimates of greenhouse gas emissions reductions and has no standardized reporting on GHG estimates. Last week, the World Bank sent an email to members o...

Washington, DC – The World Bank’s climate mitigation portfolio includes several hundred loans that appear to have nothing to do with climate mitigation, according to a new study released today by the Breakthrough Institute and the Center for Global Development. 

Too often, climate finance is treated as a proxy for climate outcomes when it comes to agenda-setting and strategy at the multilateral development banks. Over the last 18 months, the World Bank’s shareholders have led a major reform push that would have the Bank focus more on climate, with the discu...

Last month, the World Bank released an “evolution roadmap” proposing to do more on climate change in low- and middle-income countries. It is a global challenge that will have a disproportionate impact on the world’s poorest countries. But it is also important to listen to the Bank’s clients, especia...