Environmental and Social Sustainability

The World Bank Group’s mission is to fight poverty and help people help themselves by providing resources, sharing knowledge, building capacity, and forging partnerships in both the public and private sectors.     Economic, environmental, and social sustainability is the core business focus of our organization, and our bottom-line is measured by the development impact of our activities. 

The World Bank is also a multilateral organization, with a unique governance structure.  Therefore, our approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is intrinsically different than the approach of other types of organizations.  To highlight this difference, Bank has adopted the name of Environmental and Social Sustainability (ESS) to describe our activities, which in other organizations might be referred to as CSR.

In 2003, the World Bank appointed an ESS Secretariat to:

1. Advance corporate transparency, particularly sustainability reporting, by the World Bank;
2. Facilitate better internal alignment on enviornmental and social issues; and
3. Promote internal and external training and awareness of the World Bank’s CSR-related mission. 

The ESS Secretariat collaborates with a number of units within the World Bank that work on issues related to environmental and social sustainability, both within our own organization and with our clients.    This work falls in four areas: 

• Improving the impacts of our physical facilities (institutional footprint);
• Integrating environmental and social concerns into corporate and operational procurement (environmentally and socially responsible procurement);
• Supporting clients on issues related to CSR (CSR advisory work and training); and
• Disseminating information on CSR and CSR-related issues, including coporate reporting (Environmental and Social Sustainability [ESS] Secretariat).

Information on the work of specialized units and their CSR initiatives can be found by selecting “Cross Department Collaboration” to the left.