Oxfam — the British NGO — found that a huge chunk of the World Bank’s spending on climate change-related issues was “missing.”
Thank heavens for fact-checkers like the Australian Associated Press — a Poynter Institute-accredited fact-checker from down under — which set us all straight: “An Oxfam report did not find that $US41 billion has gone ‘missing’ from the World Bank’s climate change fund, contrary to claims online.”
What a relief. Instead, the AAP noted, the Oxfam report found that the World Bank just doesn’t really know where the money went.
The controversy centers around an Oct. 2024 report titled “Climate Finance Unchecked: How much does the World Bank know about the climate actions it claims?” Answer: not as much as it probably should.
The findings are front-loaded in a TL;DR on page two of the 33-page report, in case you’re not interested in reading the whole thing through: “Oxfam finds that for World Bank projects, many things can change during implementation. On average, actual expenditures on the Bank’s projects differ from budgeted amounts by 26–43% above or below the claimed climate finance. Across the entire climate finance portfolio, between 2017 and 2023, this difference amounts to US$24.28–US$41.32 billion,”