The Australian climate change minister, Chris Bowen, will use his major address at the Cop27 UN summit in Egypt to call out the World Bank for failing to address the climate crisis, and join calls for the international financial system to be reshaped.
Giving a national statement at the conference in Sharm el-Sheik on Tuesday, Bowen will declare that Australia is back as a “constructive, positive, and willing climate collaborator” since the Anthony Albanese-led Labor party ousted Scott Morrison’s rightwing coalition, which was widely criticised as a roadblock at climate negotiations.
According to an advance copy of the speech released by his office, Bowen would not outline new climate funding or policies.
He listed changes made by the Albanese government since its election in May – legislating an increased 2030 emissions target (a 43% cut compared with 2005 levels), joining a global pledge to cut methane emissions, announcing a bid with Pacific countries to co-host the 2026 UN climate conference – and said the government had “an ambitious agenda to implement”, but acknowledged greater action was needed. “We know there’s more to be done,” he said.
The minister joined a growing chorus of international voices calling for changes to the international financial system to better equip it to deal with the climate crisis, warning the existing architecture was “built for a different time” and needed to be adapted into an “inclusive climate agenda”.
“The urgency with which we must act requires frank conversations about where we are now, where we are going, and how we are going to get there,” Bowen said.
“Some of our international financial institutions are stepping up to this, our most important global task. Others are not. Just as we commit to this agenda as individual nations, our multilateral development banks – including the World Bank – must be wholeheartedly committed to this, from their purpose to their actions.”
Bowen said there was a “moral imperative and driving need” for institutions to work with countries to cut emissions and “respond to a changing climate and its economic impact on nations”. That meant increasing the proportion of funding spent on climate and ensuring developing countries were not saddled with unsustainable debt, he said.
Trillions of dollars in private and public capital will be needed to help developing countries to embrace clean energy and respond to and prepare for climate-fuelled catastrophic weather events.
Leading figures from across the developing world and the UK, US and German governments have called for sweeping changes to the World Bank, arguing it has failed to deliver climate finance to the worst-affected countries.
One of the sharpest critics has been the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley. She made the issue the centrepiece of her keynote address at Cop27 last week, arguing that “institutions crafted in the mid-20th century” – before climate justice was an issue – “cannot be effective in the third decade of the 21st century”.
Pressure on the World Bank has grown since its chief, David Malpass, told a New York Times event in September that he did not “even know” whether he accepted climate science.
The former US vice-president Al Gore, who has previously called for Malpass to resign, told the Guardian on Monday that fundamental reform of the bank could be completed within a year, allowing it to refocus its spending on the climate crisis and end its contribution to “fossil fuel colonialism”.
Bowen’s speech was preceded by a new report that found Australia’s performance on climate change had improved under the Albanese government but that it was still a “low performing country”, in part due to its continued support for fossil fuel exports.
The climate change performance index, published by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute and the Climate Action Network with input from 450 climate and energy experts and campaigners worldwide, ranked Australia 55th on a list of 63 countries and country groups. It was 59th last year.
The authors of the index criticised Australia for having no policies to phase out coal and gas mining and proposals that could increase fossil fuel production by more than 5% by 2030. “The increase is not compatible with the global 1.5C target,” they said.
Bowen said the government was proud of its achievements in climate and energy in the less than six months since it was elected, and that its increased ambition had been “warmly welcomed by countless nations and private sector investors at Cop27”.
