Do Climate Targets Affect Lending at the World Bank?

The World Bank has “ambitious” climate targets that have been accompanied by a growing proportion of its lending being labeled as climate finance. At the same time, the way that finance is defined makes it difficult to know how different the World Bank’s portfolio would look absent a climate finance target. Similarly, the World Bank has introduced a shadow price of carbon (SPC) for use in project analysis, but it does not advertise cases (if any) where the use of the SPC has changed investment choices or project design. This paper takes a brief look at the World Bank’s lending portfolio as well as the economic analysis sections of recent World Bank project appraisal documents to see if they can provide any evidence on the question, "do climate targets and carbon prices change the portfolio?" The answer to “can they provide evidence’ is "suggestive at best.” But while there is some evidence of some impact, there are also reasons to doubt it is large.