Environment Strategy

The World Bank’s strategy for the ECA region includes four broad and interrelated pillars: supporting environmentally responsible growth and poverty reduction, addressing vulnerability to natural disasters; enhancing sound environmental governance; and protecting global public goods.

Environmentally responsible growth and poverty reduction: The Bank’s support in this area covers several themes. The overall objective is to help countries achieve short term growth and prosperity agendas while at the same time addressing longer term issue of sustainable natural resource and environmental management. These include support to sustainable watershed, land, forest, river basin  and coastal zone management; support to industrial pollution control; and hazardous waste management. An area of particular importance to ECA includes addressing environmental (and social) issues in heavy industrial sectors undergoing restructuring, such as coal mining. (The additional environmental themes of   enhanced energy efficiency, and improved delivery of municipal services including water, wastewater, and solid waste  are described in the region’s energy and urban/water supply websites).

Reducing Vulnerability to Natural Disasters: The objective is to help countries plan and prepare for, more quickly recover from and mitigate the economic and human cost of natural disasters. Themes include support to emergency disaster recovery operations, earthquake and flood risk mitigation and communications support systems, drought mitigation, improved weather forecasting, dam safety, land slide and broad natural hazard mitigation.

Enhancing sound environmental governance: The objective is to help countries build transparent, effective institutions which support compliance with realistic environmental regulations and enhance competitiveness, through policy, institutional and investment support, often in the context of lending operations. Under this pillar two the region aims to ensure that operations the Bank supports are in compliance with the Bank’s  environmental safeguard policies.

Protecting Global Public Goods: the objective is to help countries meet their commitments to protect global public goods, including protection from pollution of international waters, protecting biodiversity and ecosystems management, phasing out the use of ozone depleting substances and mitigating climate change. The region has programs for enhanced management of all of the regional seas. It has taken the approach of supporting country specific investments within the framework of an agreed regional approach to management of the sea and its river basins.