Environment

Natural resources provide jobs for hundreds of millions of people, and sustain billions more. When managed well, nature can provide the foundation for sustained growth, food security, poverty reduction, and human wellbeing.

Nature loss, pollution, and degraded lands and seas are beginning to reverse decades of development progress. Addressing environmental degradation and the loss of nature is essential to ending poverty on a livable planet. 

A healthy environment is also key in ensuring that people can lead healthy and productive lives, and that public and private resources can be invested in advancing development outcomes. The world’s ecosystems regulate the air, water, and soil on which we all depend, and form a unique and cost-effective buffer against extreme weather events.

Investing in nature is smart development. Nature underpins people’s health, economies, and futures, regardless of whether they live in cities or rural areas. Through better natural resource management, environmentally friendly fiscal policies, greener financial markets, and effective waste management programs, countries can boost their long-term resilience and prosperity.

Last Updated: Apr 18,2025

Environment is at the heart of the World Bank's poverty and sustainability agenda. Building on 30+ years of experience providing analytics, finance, and knowledge to low- and middle-income countries, the Bank is supporting countries to better manage natural resources to help create jobs, improve food security, decrease pollution, and increase resilience.

The World Bank currently has $13 billion in active investments in environment, natural resources, and the ocean. Over the last decade, the Bank has emerged as one of the leading multilateral financiers for supporting good stewardship of the ocean and combatting wildlife crime. It has also supported countries to implement proper waste management and improve water and air quality, fostering a more circular economy and promoting clean development for healthier lives and better economic outcomes. 

The World Bank promotes informed decision-making through analysis and methodologies such as environmental economics and natural capital accounting. Countries are in a better position to seize growth opportunities, weigh costs and risks, and identify synergies when they understand the repercussions of policy and investment choices and are equipped with evidence and data. The Bank is helping mobilize more funding for nature, while striving to channel it to projects with real impact.

The World Bank’s Environment Department also works closely with other sectors to mainstream nature across the organization. In addition to actively investing in nature, the World Bank is prioritizing nature in its work across all sectors, including through a solid Environmental and Social Framework. It has also recently developed a Nature Finance Tracking Methodology, as part of its IDA20 commitments, designed to capture contributions to nature and to the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework in a systematic manner. The approach aligns with the MDB Common Principles for Tracking Nature-Positive Finance, and will help track financing delivering measurable positive gains for nature, as well as those investments that integrate nature in various sectors and support a broader economic transition towards nature-positive practices.

Last Updated: Apr 18,2025

In India, the World Bank is strengthening Kerala’s resilience to natural disasters, extreme weather events, disease outbreaks, and pandemics. The Resilient Kerala Program is currently supporting integrated and sustainable water and land management, and a shift to climate-smart agriculture. It also supports the establishment of an IT-enabled One Health platform that will strengthen coordination, joint surveillance, and preparedness to counter future zoonotic disease outbreaks.

In Rwanda, the World Bank is helping the municipal government in Kigali integrate ecosystem services into urban planning, through technical assistance to develop a comprehensive, evidence-based stormwater management master plan, and through investments in integrated infrastructure solutions that reduce runoff along human settlements and restore the flood attenuation capacity and water quality of the wetlands. With support of a grant from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), wetland restoration is being piloted on 194 hectares and is expected to improve resilience and urban livelihoods for more than 250,000 people exposed to increasingly frequent flood events.

As part of the World Bank-led, GEF-funded, Global Wildlife Program, 19 countries across Africa are working together to combat the illegal wildlife trade – widely reported as the world’s fourth largest crime. Through efforts to halt poaching, address human wildlife conflict, scale up sustainable land and forest management, and develop nature-based tourism, projects in Chad, Gabon, Malawi, the Republic of Congo, South Africa, and Zambia are protecting flagship species such as elephants and rhino, improving the management of 9.5 million hectares, restoring over 100,000 hectares, and benefitting 680,000 people through diversified and resilient livelihoods that are consistent with wildlife conservation.

The World Bank is helping Morocco realize the full potential of its rich blue assets in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, which contribute substantially to economic growth and job creation. Through targeted investments to strengthen two key blue sectors - tourism and fisheries – the program promotes resilient and sustainable integrated management to restore 78,270 hectares of marine and coastal areas, with a focus on creating jobs and improving biodiversity management in seven selected sites. Notably, it will also promote Moroccan tourism through better environmental monitoring and protection of its beaches.

In Vietnam, the World Bank’s Plastics Pollution Diagnostics report strengthened the government’s understanding of key sources of land-based plastic pollution to inform the implementation of their National Action Plan on the Management of Marine Plastic Litter. A related report, Toward a National Single-use Plastics Roadmap in Vietnam, proposes a gradual effort to combat this pollution through a mix of policy instruments. The Bank has also provided analytical support to improve marine plastic waste management in Vietnam’s fisheries sector and is working to promote private sector solutions and investment in plastics recycling via value-chain diagnostics and public-private dialogue. It is also supporting Vietnam to move towards a modern, integrated, cost-effective and sustainable solid waste management system.

Last Updated: Apr 18,2025

Investing in nature requires a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach – to broaden the coalition of partners across public and private sectors, civil society, philanthropy, multilaterals, the financial sector, and indigenous peoples and local communities. Multi-stakeholder partnerships are a critical aspect of World Bank engagement on the environment, pooling expertise, access, and resources.

The PROBLUE program, administered by the World Bank, supports the development of integrated, sustainable, and healthy marine and coastal resources. PROBLUE is an accelerator for the World Bank’s overall ocean portfolio. PROBLUE focuses on four key areas: sustainable fisheries and aquaculture; marine pollution, including litter and plastics; oceanic sectors such as tourism, maritime transport and offshore renewable energy; and building government capacity to manage marine resources.

PROGREEN—the Global Partnership for Sustainable and Resilient Landscapes—is a World Bank-administered Umbrella Multi-Donor Program that supports rural livelihood development and landscape restoration, while tackling declining biodiversity, forest loss, and deteriorating land fertility.

The Global Program on Sustainability (GPS) promotes the use of high-quality data and analysis on natural capital, ecosystem services, and sustainability to better inform decisions made by governments, the private sector, and financial institutions.

The Global Wildlife Program (GWP) is a grant program spanning projects across 38 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, with $365 million in GEF financing and $2 billion in co-financing. The GWP addresses issues such as illegal wildlife trade, unsustainable wildlife trade, human-wildlife conflict, and zoonotic spillover risk. It also promotes wildlife-based economies and nature-based tourism as a response to the lack of sustainable livelihood opportunities for local communities. The program enables cooperation and knowledge sharing across national and local governments and partners to create long-lasting impact.  

The World Bank also leads the GEF-funded Amazon Sustainable Landscape Program (ASL), which is improving integrated landscape management and ecosystem conservation in seven Amazon countries. 

Led by the World Bank, the NBS Invest project aims to increase funding and integrate nature-based solutions into the Bank operations in the world's Least Developed Countries (LDCs). It collaborates with the GEF and 14 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, offering knowledge, sharing expertise, and fostering collaboration.

Last Updated: Apr 18,2025