board of executive directors of the world bank (wb)

The World Bank was one of the institutions created at the end of World War II at the Bretton Woods Conference, with the aims of reconstructing war-torn countries and fostering development worldwide. The World Bank is formed by two main bodies - the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Agency (IDA), both with the mission of reducing poverty by financing projects in countries in need. The former focuses on middle-income and creditworthy poorer countries, and the latter, on the poorest countries in the world. The Bank's decisions are the responsibility of its two core organs: the Board of Governors, composed of representatives of all member countries and responsible for outlining the Bank's policies, and the Board of Executive Directors, which will be simulated once again at UFRGSMUN 2008.

The Board of Executive Directors is responsible for the Bank's general operations, defining policies and exercising powers delegated to it by the Board of Governors. It is composed by 24 Executive Directors. Each of the Bank's five largest donors (United States, Japan, France, Germany and United Kingdom) appoint their own Executive Director, while other members are grouped in constituencies, which may be composed of a single country. Each constituency elects the Executive Director that will represent it.

Acting in a wider scope than its first objective as an international organization, the World Bank has moved its main focus to issues related to development and poverty reduction. Concerned with the emerging issues on the global agenda, the Bank has launched studies on the area of environmental change, whereas it is directly linked to socioeconomic conditions. Pursuing its mission to reduce poverty, the Bank sees the measures against climate change also as a tool to reach better life standards, especially in developing countries. An environmentally reasonable international trade could be one of the ways to strengthen, at the same time, national economies and environmental safety. It is a task of the Board to address guidelines on how trade policies can be shaped in order to achieve this synergy.

Topic: Trade Policies Addressing Climate Change

Since the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) - one of the first international treaties concerning the issue of global warming - in 1992, the international community has definitely awakened to the impacts of climate change in its development forecasts. The Kyoto Protocol - an additional treaty to the UNFCCC's agenda, which formulated an international commitment to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) - added a legal and practical framework to the global warming mitigation efforts, but has been raising confronting ideas throughout the world. Despite the achievements of previous efforts to tackle the problem during the last decade, a final solution to the growing concern over the global environmental scenario has not yet been outlined.

Nevertheless, the perception of a "climate crisis" situation has changed, allowing further outcomes in the core of the debates. The evolution of scientific knowledge regarding environmental issues has brought the question to a convergence of thoughts. It is now widely accepted that human action is responsible for the climate changes the world has been facing recently. The feasible mitigation costs would be of around 1 percent of the world's GDP, which is a small amount if compared with the costs of inaction (STERN REVIEW, 2006). Thus, measures must take place in order to block the announced harm to global development (UNDP, 2007).

New approaches have revealed that trade can play a crucial role in this process. At first, trade was seen only as a way to promote economic growth, an engine for consumption, pollution and waste - enemies of the environment. Nowadays, its capabilities to promote both economic development and environmental improvements by stimulating transactions that include clean products are recognized. There are evidences of linkages between trade measures fighting climate change and increasing new economic opportunities brought by scale, composition, technique and direct effects of adapting the global production to match environmental goals (COSBEY, 2007b). Meanwhile, it becomes vital to develop institutional and legal conditions that can put this synergy forward without harmful effects to international competitiveness (COSBEY, 2007a).

Through recent years, the World Bank has demonstrated its major concern with environmental standards and deals with it as a development issue. The Bank sees climate change as a threat mainly for those countries with lesser possibilities to face it - the developing countries. At the same time, those countries have on climate change mitigation an opportunity to achieve economic goals and reduce poverty (CLIMATE CHANGE, 2008). Therefore, the Bank's challenge is to provide technical and financial assistance for the trade on climate-friendly goods and initiatives (WORLD BANK, 2008). Finding market solutions to channel the outcomes of the environmental adaptation to reach better economic results through international trade is the mission of the World Bank Board of the Executive Directors at UFRGSMUN 2008.

References:

Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. HM Treasury. London: 2006.
UNDP. Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting climate change: human solidarity in a divided world. United Nations, New York, 2007.
COSBEY, Aaron. Trade and Climate Change Linkages. International Institute for Sustainable Development. Trade Ministers' Dialogue on Climate Change Issues, Bali. December, 2007(b).
COSBEY, Aaron; TARASOFSK, Richard. Climate Change, Competitiveness and Trade. A Chatham House Report. May, 2007(a).
Climate Change and Development: Overview. http://web.worldbank.org. Last access on March 14th 2008.
International Trade and Climate Change: Economic, legal and institutional perspectives. World Bank, Washington DC, 2008.