Environment Hindering Growth : Wolfensohn

World Bank President James Wolfensohn said on Wednesday that environmental problems threatened the economic development of the worlds poorest nations.

Wolfensohn, addressing the U.N. Earth Summit, called for international measures to ensure the developing world could make economic progress without increasing pollution. Poverty reduction and the environment are twins, Wolfensohn told reporters before addressing the summit. Its very difficult to achieve environmental sustainability and not attack poverty. . The bank unveiled proposals at the summit to preserve forests, scale back carbon gas emissions, and provide fresh money for the United Nations fund on climatic and biodiversity problems.

We at the bank are more aware than ever of the continuing line between the degrading environment and the poverty still afflicting so many of the worlds people, Wolfensohn said. He asked the international community to replenish the Global Environmental

 

Facility (GEF), which funded measures emerging from the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. He called for the GEF to receive $2 billion to match its initial mandate, plus $500 million in arrears never paid to the fund. Wolfensohn said he had found corporations to be more receptive than some governments to the cause of sustainable development. There is a growing awareness in the private sector that environment and social responsibility is good business, he said. Unless you have sustainability, youre not going to have long-term economic development. The World Bank, along with the World Widlife Fund, proposed that 10 per cent of the worlds forest types be protected by 2000, and that large areas of the forests in developing nations be managed properly by 2005.

The bank proposed setting up a carbon offset fund that would help emerging nations acquire technology and allow industrialised countries to cut their emissions.

Wolfensohn also reported that a World Bank-led programme would phase out Russias production of ozone-depleting clorofluorocarbons (CFC) by 2000. Russia is still producing them despite having signed a treaty abolishing the chemicals.