Fears as W’Bank pulls out from funding oil, gas exploration for renewable energy
Nations leaving on oil and gas revenues including Nigeria may from 2019, begin to look for deep pockets assistance, than the World Bank as it has announced ending any form of assistance in oil and gas exploration and extraction from 2019.
Making the announcement at the one day French Climate Summit seeking to boost the global economy’s shift to clean energy, the bank in a statement in Paris, made it clear that “The World Bank Group will no longer finance upstream oil and gas, after 2019”.
At the summit, world leaders sought to unlock more money for the shift away from Earth-warming fossil fuels.
The move, it said, was meant to help countries meet the greenhouse gas-curbing pledges they had made in support of the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming.
In the views of the bank, “In exceptional circumstances, consideration will be given to financing upstream gas in the poorest countries where there is a clear benefit in terms of energy access for the poor and the project fits within the countries’ Paris Agreement commitments”.
World Bank further noted that it was “on track to meet its target of 28 percent of its lending going to climate action by 2020.”
It would be recalled that the World Bank’s mandate is to provide finance and other assistance to aid the economic advancement of developing countries.
It co-sponsored the one-day summit called by French President Emmanuel Macron to find ways to unlock the money needed for the global economy’s costly shift away from fossil fuels to less-polluting energy sources, and to shore up countries’ defences against climate-change induced weather disasters.
The bank further disclosed that time has come for trillions of dollars to be invested in clean energy technology to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting average global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
