World Bank urges fresh push on economic threat of pollution

LONDON: Degraded land, polluted air and water stress pose a direct global economic threat but using natural resources more efficiently could cut pollution by half, one of the World Bank’s senior managing directors told Reuters.

The damage is particularly acute for low-income countries most at threat from poverty, climate change and biodiversity loss, Axel van Trotsenburg said.

Speaking alongside the publication of a new report on Monday, he said around 80% of people in low-income nations were exposed to all three and the World Bank was committed to responding even as many countries cut aid budgets.

“Our commitment... is ending poverty on a liveable planet, full stop. We will not waver on this,” van Trotsenburg said.

Among the most impacted countries are Burundi, where 8 million people face water risk and air pollution, and 7 million face land degradation. In Malawi, 12 million people face all three risks, the report said.

More broadly, 90% of the world’s population face at least one of the challenges, with the report urging countries to repurpose subsidies currently spent on harmful activities.

The report is published against a fractious political backdrop ahead of November’s COP30 climate talks in Brazil. The World Bank and other multilateral lenders are also awaiting the outcome of a US review of their operations ordered by President Donald Trump in February. The World Bank would provide data-backed evidence to inform discussions on environmental degradation among its member governments, van Trotsenburg said.

The report estimated that forests help around half of the world’s rain clouds form and said deforestation cut rainfall at a cost of $14 billion a year for the nine-country Amazon region alone, a material hit for the affected nations.

It also means landscapes are less able to store and release moisture slowly over time. That amplifies the effects of droughts and results in a $379 billion hit, or 8% of global agricultural economic output.

While ecological threats were often seen as being distant, the report zeroed in on economic impacts happening now.

“We’ve often had this mantra that we believed countries need to grow first, pollute and clean up later. What this evidence is telling you is that is simply false,” the bank’s chief economist for sustainable development and report co-author, Richard Damania, said.