ENVIRONMENT: Development chiefs say they will pay for environment

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Oct 6 1995 (IPS) - One after the other, the five men with the tightest grip on purse strings of global development aid stood up Friday to tell a packed hall they were ready to pay for environmental change.

It was an unprecedented event.

The same pledge came from Gus Speth, James Wolfensohn, Enrique Iglesias, Mitsuo Sato and Brian Atwood — the respective heads of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

The men were brought together by Ismail Serageldin — the World Bank’s vice-president for environmentally sustainable development — to give closing speeches at a three-day conference on “effective financing” for environmental projects around the world.

There were also women leaders of global development agencies: Elizabeth Dowdeswell, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Huguette Labelle, the president of the Canadian International Development Agency, and Nafis Sadik, the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), also spoke to the same theme.

“This (conference) indicates that the doors of the Bank are open. I’ve been to 25 countries in the last few months and I’ve seen the ravages of the forests and slums. The linkage between the poor and the environment is very tough,” said Wolfensohn.

“I’ve read 49 books about what we (the Bank) have done wrong. I want you to know that there are some things that we have done right. I want you to know we need each other,” he added.

Iglesias was just as ready to accept a vision of the future. “We have a new type of institution facing the new reality,” he told the audience. “There is a saying — God always forgives, man sometimes, nature never.”

Sato and Iglesias both pledged to put half of their agencies’ portfolios towards social and environmental change. “We have learnt that growth, if it does not take into account poverty, can lead to environmental degradation,” said Sato.

The three-day meeting was packed with events on funding for environmental projects. Companies like Shell Petroleum and Enron, the world’s largest natural gas company, sent speakers to present their plans for an environmentally friendly future.

A large number of environmental and social activists also spoke: Lester Brown, the head of the WorldWatch Institute; Kathryn Wilson, the president of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); Claude Martin the director of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and Mohammed Yunus, the managing director of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the virtual inventor of micro-lending.

Earlier in the conference, U.S. Vice President Al Gore told students at American University, environment ministers, and other participants that “A new ecological awareness is beginning to emerge. Now is the time for concrete initiatives. Together we can meet the challenges ahead,” he said.

Barbara Bramble of the U.S. National Wildlife Federation said the multilateral institutions appeared to be making some positive moves.

“Finally they are listening and they admit that we were right. I am very pleased because I think the Bank has stopped its destructive projects,” she told IPS.

Andrew Steer, the World Bank’s environment director standing nearby, was unable to hear her praise. He was busy explaining his policies to a group of young people who were loudly protesting the Bank’s record of funding environmentally damaging dams, roads and logging projects.

Johan Frijns and Danny Kennedy, two activists with Action for Solidarity, Equality, Environment and Development (A SEED), who were leading the group of about 25 people, had just missed Wolfesohn and the other development experts.

Not all the environment chiefs were as ready to tackle criticism.

Kazi Jalal, the head of the environment department of the ADB, said he was not sure that ADB forestry loans made to Laos had resulted in forest destruction.

“I have looked at the photographs that the staff brought back and it looked like they were planting new trees on totally degraded lands,” he told IPS.

Laotian activists have complained that the loans will be used by plantation owners to plant trees on communally owned lands used by poor people.

When questioned by IPS, Sato, the head of the ADB, said he was unaware of the project in Laos and of the possible impacts of ADB- funded forestry projects in the Philippines.

Some delegates left a little disappointed.

Bank information officers had issued a press release the day before the start of the conference, saying Wolfensohn would announce a major environmental initiative. The announcement was cancelled at the last minute.