Climate change threatens to derail development, even as development pumps ever-greater quantities of carbon dioxide into an atmosphere already polluted with two centuries of Western emissions. The World Bank, with a newly articulated strategic framework on development and climate change, must confront these entangled threats in helping its clients to carve out a sustainable growth path.
This phase of the evaluation, focused on the World Bank (and not the IFC or MIGA) assesses the World Bank's experience with key win-win policies in the energy sector—policies that combine gains at the country level with globally beneficial greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions. Within the range of win-win policies, two have long been discussed but are more relevant than ever in light of 2008's spike in energy prices: removal of energy subsidies and promotion of end-user energy efficiency. Energy subsidies are expensive, damage the climate, and disproportionately benefit the well-off. Their reduction can encourage energy efficiency, increase the attractiveness of renewable energy, and allow more resources to flow to poor people and to investments in cleaner power. MORE 
End-user energy efficiency has long been viewed as a win-win approach with great potential for reducing emissions. It becomes increasingly attractive as the costs of constructing and fueling power plants rise. About 5 percent of the Bank's energy commitments by value (about 10 percent by number ) have gone to specific efficiency efforts, including end-user efficiency and district heating. MOREÂ
The record levels of energy prices in 2008, although they have now been relaxed, provide the impetus for the Bank and its clients to choose mor sustainable growth trajectories. To help clients cope with the burden of these prices and take advantage of the signals they send for sustainability, the Bank can do four things:- It can make promotion of energy efficiency a priority, using efficiency investments and policies to adjust to higher prices and constructing economies that are more resilient.
- It can assist countries in removing subsidies by helping to design and finance programs that protect the poor and help others adjust to higher prices.
- It can promote a systems approach to energy.
- And it can motivate and inform these actions, internally and externally, by supporting better measurement of energy use, expenditures, and impacts.
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This evaluation is the first of a series that seeks lessons from the World Bank Group's experience in how to carve out a sustainable growth path.Phase I is focused on the World Bank only. Phase II will look at project-level experience in promoting technologies for renewable energy and energy efficiency across the entire World Bank Group (WB, IFC and MIGA).Phase III will focus on adaptation to climate change.
Evaluation Approach
The World Bank Group has never had an explicit corporate strategy on climate change against which evaluative assessments could be made. However, a premise of this evaluation series is that many of the climate-oriented policies and investments under discussion have close analogues in the past, and thus can be assessed, whether or not they were explicitly oriented to climate change mitigation.
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