The World Bank is by far the largest provider of climate finance. Its climate portfolio comprises almost $119 billion in various types of funding that it will spend over the course of 23 years. Of that, it has already invested $37 billion between 2020 and 2022 to fund 2,554 climate projects from low- and middle-income countries, including 1,179 described as being focused on climate mitigation activities.

The researchers, who analysed every project in the portfolio, found that a large number of the ones tagged as “climate” had little to nothing to do with it, and included instead administrative and bureaucratic projects: payment automation for salaries in Afghanistan, municipal transparency in Gaza, fiscal management in Benin.