The World Bank (WB) on Tuesday came under fire in a moot as experts said the Bank pushed Pakistan’s energy sector into debt and sabotaged the country’s transition into clean energy.
The World Bank (WB) on Tuesday came under fire in a moot as experts said the Bank pushed Pakistan’s energy sector into debt and sabotaged the country’s transition into clean energy.
Alliance for Climate Justice & Clean Energy (ACJCE), a coalition of think tanks and civil society organisations working on energy transition in Pakistan, organised a webinar where they shed light on the Bank’s role in energy and environmental crises.
Sharing findings of their research studies, experts criticised over the WB actions, which they said impacted the country’s energy sector.
“Arguably, the Bank’s most important actions were tariff policy reforms that made new coal power investments in Pakistan the world’s most profitable,” Heike Mainhardt, senior advisor at Urgewald, a Germany-based non-profit organisation said.
“As a result, the country is tied to very high capacity payments for coal power, leading to high subsidies and consumer tariffs.”
She added the World Bank’s technical assistance in Pakistan provided a road map to attract investors into country’s coal sector from 2009 to 2012.
Fran Witt, campaigns lead at Recourse, a Netherlands-based not-for-profit organisation, discussed a research study co-published by Recourse and Alternative Law Collective (ALC), a Pakistan-based firm.
“The World Bank’s Development Policy Finance (DPF) for Pakistan’s energy sector amounted to $1.4 billion from 2020 to 2021 and therefore, has a huge impact on energy policy and investment,” she said.
She suggested that all fossil fuels must be included on the excluded expenditures list for Development Policy Financing (DPF), through which the Bank could support Pakistan to build energy from its renewable energy sources, instead of relying on expensive coal or LNG imports.
Experts associated with at least two international think tanks believed that bank’s support for Thar coal power projects would soon make them become a huge source of of air pollutants, such as mercury and CO2, in South Asia.
Zain Moulvi, director research at ALC, said he World Bank’s tacit support of Thar coal and its damaging DPF loan conditionality demonstrated a complex mechanism to instigate crises in the energy sector.
“Thar coal projects will significantly raise electricity tariffs and have already caused massive displacement and loss of livelihood in Thar. They are further projected to cause up to 29,000 air pollution-related deaths,” he said.
He added the Bank’s flagship PACE project was meant to facilitate Pakistan’s transition to cheap and clean energy. However, he continued that the project had instead forced the country to plan its energy mix around costly, socially and environmentally destructive fossil fuels and large hydro projects.
Ahsan Kamal, lecturer at Quaid-Azam University, appreciated the research studies for shedding light on international financial institutions’ support for costly projects in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Global South.
Source: The News