Toxins in the air have reached “hazardous” levels in Pristina, Kosovo, last week. A ban on cars is welcome. But the real problem is the lignite coal plants nearby. So why is the Kosovo government, the US and the World Bank all supporting yet another new plant in the region? JACK DAVIES and GIOVANNI VALE investigate
The Kenyan government has begun to forcibly evict tens of thousands of Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral forest lands and burn their homes, food stores and belongings to the ground. The World Bank wrings its hands.
The Kenyan government has sent troops to the Embobut forest to forcefully - and illegally - evict thousands of its indigenous inhabitants, to make way for a World Bank-financed 'Natural Resource Management Project'.
The World Bank's President Dr Kim proclaims his human and green concerns. But at Tata Mundra in Gujarat, India, his support for a 4,000MW coal fired power plant is devastating poor communities and despoliating their environment.
On the Kazakh side of the Aral Sea, water levels are rising, and fishing communities are being rebuilt. The future of the South Aral Sea, bordering on Uzbekistan, is still in doubt. Matilda Lee reports from Aral City
Ahead of the release of the World Bank's revised energy strategy, the Ecologist speaks to sustainable development advocate Srinivas Krishnaswamy about why despite huge gigawatt power projects, 45 per cent of India's households still lack electricity
Report on land-grabbing reveals large-scale farmland deals amounted to 45 million hectares in 2009 alone with 6 million hectares expected to be added every year in less industrialised countries
Oxford Economics Professor and former head of Development Research at the World Bank, Paul Collier on reconciling romantic environmentalism and mainstream economics to help poor countries
Copper underwires the modern world, running through everything from the gas guzzler to the wind turbine. Any country that finds substantial reserves of the metal ought to consider itself to have struck gold. That is, until you let the World Bank decide how your mines should be run…
Environmental groups were pleased at the end of 2007 when the UN announced that its under-resourced adaptation funds - established to help less-industrialised nations adapt to the effects of climate change - were to receive a cash injection.
As the bluetongue virus sinks its teeth into British livestock, there is one appalling certainty: like the outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease and foot-and-mouth before it, some farmers will see no way out, and take their own lives. Farmers in Britain are the profession second most likely to commit suicide (after, bizarrely, dentistry).
A new U.N. led scheme called "Reduced Emissions from Deforestation" (RED) is due to be announced later this year that aims to make it rewarding for countries to preserve their forests rather than cut them down.
In a damning cover up the Chinese government has used its involvement in a World Bank report on the environment to conceal results that show around three quarters of a million people in the country die prematurely each year due to pollution.
Environmentalists had waited with baited breath for the Chancellor's 2007 Budget. Gordon Brown had intimated that it would be the 'greenest ever'. In fact, it was a resounding disappointment.
The World Bank has released a report encouraging the Indonesian government to create vast timber plantations that would damage local ecosystems and livelihood, in order to encourage economic growth.
Death is rarely something to be celebrated, but I can’t say I shed a tear last week when I heard that Milton Friedman, the father of neoliberal economics, had gone to the great free market in the sky.
