According to a June 1997 report by the Institute for Policy Studies and the International Trade Information Service, investments made by the World Bank are playing a significant role in fueling climate change. Over their lifetimes these projects will release 9.5 billion tons of carbon, or about one and a half times global fossil fuel emissions for 1995. Bank energy strategists admit that 2 billion rural poor are dependent on women's ability to gather fuelwood and dung to meet their energy needs. They will remain unserviced under any scenario.
Women are energy managers in virtually every developing country in the world.
But, Bank planners fail to even allude to the gender dimensions of the rural energy crisis, ensuring that Bank policies and projects do not address the roots of the problem. The Bank, which unveiled its Global Carbon Initiative at the Kyoto climate change conference in December, hopes to eventually extend this scheme to developing countries. Yet, the study found that the Bank invests 100 times more money on projects which promote climate change than on projects which avert it. The Bank thus wants to profit at the front end and at the tail end of climate change. They are the number one public financier of fossil fuels around the world, and now they are proposing to buy and sell credits to make their investments slightly less polluting.