To tackle climate change, take on corruption
Jim Anderson
|November 22, 2021
It is easy to think of development priorities as competitors that must vie with one another for headlines and the public’s attention. Yet these goals are often mutually reinforcing. To take one example, tackling climate change is the challenge of our time, but addressing other issues can support those efforts, not detract from them. The fight against corruption is a case in point. Headline-writers like to put dollar figures on the costs of corruption, but the real damage comes in the form of misdirected and poor-quality investments, including the outlays needed to mitigate the effects of a rising sea level and desertification. The true costs of corruption are the slow and inadequate responses to natural disasters, which are increasing in frequency because of climate change. The true costs come in the form of weakened fiscal space to address urgent needs such as the climate crisis.
It’s no surprise that some of the sectors that are so central to taking on climate change are also notorious for their corruption risks. Extractives, with large costs and rents, have long been a concern of environmental and anticorruption activists. The size of the rents, remote locations, and power imbalances between affected people and decision makers can create a mother lode of corruption. Beyond the risk of those rents being siphoned off by kleptocratic leaders and extractives companies, corruption also makes it easier to evade regulations and reclamation, which results in environmental damage and overuse of the resource. As the United States’ first National Intelligence Estimate to focus on climate change put it, countries dependent on fossil fuels for revenues “struggle to diversify their sources of export revenue because of entrenched political interests, endemic corruption, and the lack of economic and legal institutions.”
https://blogs.worldbank.org/climatechange/tackle-climate-change-take-corruption?cid=ccg_tt_climatechange_en_ext
