World Bank to stop backing oil projects

LONDON - Reuters

The World Bank will stop financing oil and gas exploration and extraction from 2019, it announced on Dec. 12 at a climate summit seeking to boost the global economy’s shift to clean energy. 

“The World Bank Group will no longer finance upstream oil and gas, after 2019,” it said in a statement in Paris, where 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 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,” the statement said.     

The bank also announced it was “on track to meet its target of 28 percent of its lending going to climate action by 2020.”

In its 2016 annual report, the World Bank Group said it had invested just over $3 billion in “extractive industries”, which also include mining, in 2016 -- three times as much as the year before.