Other Ongoing Initiatives

The World Bank continues to engage with religious leaders worldwide, and in the following years new activities planned under the Faiths and Forests Initiative include:

• Building up from the work implemented in the preceding years, the World Bank is supporting the preparation of an extraordinary inaugural meeting of the Asian Buddhist Network to be held in Ulaanbaatar in June/July 2004, under the personal direction of Prime Minister Enkhbayar. This will bring together leaders of traditionally Buddhist countries (Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India (Ladakh), Lao PDR, Mongolia, Myanmar, Russia (Buryat), and Thailand ) and Asian Buddhist environmental and development practitioners.
  
  
• The World Bank is also planning to start activities in Latin America and the Caribbean in partnership with the Benedictine movement and the World Council of Churches. The Benedictines are a large, self-governing Catholic order, locally autonomous answerable only to the Vatican; they have 360 monasteries in Africa, Middle East, and Latin America (as well as 500 in Europe and North America), and are already engaged in areas such as alternative energy, land management, and education. They are also active in interfaith activities with monasteries worldwide. Evangelical Protestantism is growing very fast in LAC with many 'varied' denominations.
  
  
• The World Bank also hopes to engage the world's largest producers of Bible-based materials – SIL (the Summer Institute of Languages, the main Bible translation organization world wide, working actively in 1200 languages) and Gideons to discuss environmentally appropriate paper use and the production of Bible-based educational resources on ecology for translation.
  
  
• The World Bank is also supporting a Buddhist Training Workshop in Cambodia in February 2004 to enable knowledge-sharing among monks from Thailand, Lao PDR, Vietnam and Cambodia.
  
  
• The World Bank is also beginning to engage with Buddhists in China in preparation for the Asian Buddhist Network meeting, as well as on traditional Chinese medicines, urban environmental initiatives and sacred mountain protection.
  
  
• The World Bank is supporting Khmer-speaking monks in southern Vietnam to engage in local environmental programs an existing IDA project.
  
  
• The World Bank is also planning to begin support of monastery-led tree planting and environmental education in Lao PDR.