The World Bank are tits at it. Private Charities are bloody good at it. Will David Shearer’s “Does it work?” approach mean that we don’t waste money on the World Bank?
The World Bank has done almost nothing with the billions it was given to save the rainforests.
…Most of our collective CO2 emissions come from cars and power stations. We’re not going to give up driving or using electricity, and for at least the next decade, those activities will continue to generate a vast amount of CO2. Yet there are some practical steps that can be taken to reduce emissions – the most obvious being to stop the destruction of the world’s rainforests. This increases atmospheric CO2 by six billion tonnes a year, which is roughly the amount produced by the entire US economy. If we could stop rainforests being chopped down, we could make a significant dent in global CO2 emissions, and we could do it now – not in 15 or 20 years.
Some of the world’s governments have realised this. In September 2008, 14 countries, led by the US and Britain, set up a global fund for diminishing CO2 emissions. The US donated $2 billion; we put in $1.4 billion; the Germans and French gave $813 million and $300 million respectively. In total, a whopping $6.5 billion was raised, of which $1.1 billion was handed to the World Bank with instructions that it should be used, immediately, to prevent rainforest destruction.
Billions hand over to protect rainforests. What happend to the cash?
And what has happened to that money in the more than four years that have passed since then? Next to nothing. Incredibly, the World Bank has spent less than 10 per cent of the money it received. The Forest Investment Programme alone got $600 million from UK taxpayers, but the World Bank has not spent any of that money on diminishing the rate at which the world’s rainforests disappear. It has, however, spent $15 million on its own administration costs.
This is incompetence on an appalling scale. During the last four years, deforestation has put more than 20 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Britain, meanwhile, has committed itself to an almost certainly unfeasible programme of replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation by wind power – a programme which, even if it works as planned, will not have anything like the effect on emissions that a drastic reduction in the rate of rainforest destruction would.
The World Bank argues that it’s not easy to distribute money while ensuring that it is spent on the purpose for which it has been donated – especially not in places like Congo, where central government, in so far as it exists at all, is corrupt and chronically inefficient.
Asking a bureaucrat to account for something is like asking a hooker to practice chastity.
But there is a simple answer to that problem: don’t go through governments. And avoiding governments is exactly what some private charities do. For example, Cool Earth, a British charity, works through the people who live and work in the forests. By giving those people additional incentives to resist the loggers (which does not require a huge amount of money), Cool Earth has prevented the destruction of around 250,000 acres of rainforest in Peru. The project is of course small – but there is no reason whatever why the same model could not be applied on a far wider scale.
The World Bank, however, insists on going through governments and ministries. That is why it has achieved nothing except the creation of some carbon-emitting offices and a great deal of paper. It will continue to achieve nothing until it learns from small charities such as Cool Earth.
Name one single thing a government has ever done that hasn’t cost way more than the private sector could do it for. Governments are tits at providing anything other than tax collectors.
