The World Bank reportedly spent almost $4 billion on fossil fuel projects in 2022, new research suggests.

Urgewald, a German a non-profit environmental and human rights organisation, has published a report which claims that $3.7 billion of the World Bank’s trade finance went to oil and gas projects in 2022.

The report claims that this, if true, would “cast serious doubts” over the World Bank's commitments to the Paris Climate Accords adopted in 2015.

Condemning the bank’s “severe lack of transparency”, Urgewald said that its research was only able to “formulate an estimate” for gas and oil transactions meted out by the World Bank’s private sector arm the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Urgwald’s conclusions were based on IFC’s Global Trade Finance Platform (GTFP) spend, which it said accounted for $6.4 billion across various countries in African and other regions of the world in 2022.

It explained that the programme provides guarantees to a pre-approved list of banks covering trade-related payment obligations and that global “confirming” bank requests an IFC guarantee to cover the payment coming from an importer’s local “issuing” bank.

From here, the IFC’s trade transactions staff approve and issue the guarantee, it explained, noting that the IFC does not include coal-, oil-, or gas-related goods.

Urgewald said that the World Bank Group’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) assessment found that oil and gas accounted for an average of 18 per cent -- ranging between 15 to 27 per cent – while in Africa, oil and gas averaged 50 per cent.

The IEG’s reporting also revealed that in Nigeria, 54 per cent of GTFP funding was in the oil and gas industry, Urgewald added.

All of these factors led Urgewald to its estimates that around $3.7 billion in trade finance funding likely went to oil or gas related projects.

Research author Heike Mainhardt called for reform of the IFC on the basis that disclosures are not transparent enough to be able to determine precisely how much funding is going towards certain projects.

Commenting on the findings, Mainhardt told the Guardian: “They can see that they can access public money this way, without drawing attention to themselves, and they’re very clever, so they will do this.”

The IFC has since refuted Urgewald’s research and stated that it contains "serious factual inaccuracies and grossly overstates IFC's support for fossil fuels".

"IFC’s trade finance projects are selected through a rigorous process that balances climate commitments with the urgent development needs in the countries where we work,” a group spokesperson told the Guardian. “IFC excludes coal from trade financing and only permits oil and gas on a limited basis for distribution purposes only (no production), contingent on development impact.”

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