Environmental Topics

The World Bank’s mission to reduce poverty means achieving the sustainable use of natural resources and managing them effectively to minimize pollution, degradation, and risks. This requires a broad range of efforts at the global, national, and local levels, across a number of critical and interrelated sectors.

When working on key environmental issues, the Bank teams, are guided by the following principles:

• focus on the positive linkages between poverty reduction and environmental protection
• focus first on local environmental benefits, and build on the overlaps with regional and global benefits
• address the vulnerability and adaptation needs of developing countries
• facilitate transfer of financial resources to client countries to help them meet the costs of generating global and environmental benefits not matched by national benefits
• stimulate markets for environmental public goods

Complementing the operational and sector environmental work, the World Bank is also an implementing agency of the Global Environment Facility, the  Multilateral Fund for the Montreal Protocol, and the Convention to Combat Desertification and a primary funder of projects in support of the Biodiversity Convention and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs).

We work with our client countries to help them meet the objectives of the international environmental conventions and associated protocols. To accomplish this, we actively engage in public and private partnerships to facilitate technical assistance, the transfer of financial resources and environmentally friendly technologies, and the development of markets for environmental goods and services.

Environment teams support and/or contribute to a number of thematic and partnership websites which can be accessed through this and other sections of the Environment website.