The UK must stop funding World Bank aid until the Bank stops financing unabated coal power stations in development countries, says the Environment Audit Committee in a new study on the impact of UK overseas aid on environmental security and climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, Joan Walley slammed the World Bank, saying it "should not assume continued support from the UK unless it changes its ways".
She too had harsh words for the Department for International Development (DFID), arguing that it "inevitably to get tough and use its side as a major shareholder to vote down dirty coal powered energy projects and see that the Public Banks portfolio isnt making climate change worse".
Last year's Spending Review gave Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) an addition in expenditure, one of the very few budgets to get an increase, from 8.4 million in 2010 to 12.0 billion in 2013. This is to observe a dedication to meet the United Nations (UN) target of providing 0.7% of Gross National Income as aid by 2013.
This is not the start sentence that DFID's performance on the environment has been criticised. A 2006 report said its processes for environmental safeguarding of aid programmes was inadequate, and concluded that DFID's climate change policy lacked coherence, and was "flat and indirectly responsible for very significant emissions of c into the atmosphere".
This new study shows little has changed since then, a fact supported by a National Audit Office report from February of this year, Aid and the Environment, in which DFID claimed it is trying to become more climate smart but was ineffective to offer any show that it had integrated environmental sustainability into development programmes.
The EAC also attacks the Government's Export Credits Guarantee Department, saying its activities "are not in contrast with the Government's wider sustainable development principles" and need immediate reform.
It recommends that "the ECGD should not support fossil fuel projects. It should arise and publish strategies for implementing the Coalition Agreement commitment to change its back to low carbon and green technologies."
The MPs say also need to see environmental impact assessments conducted "on all the projects that the ECGD supports, irrespective of size or repayment terms".
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