NGO and Bankpolicy.doc

此文档收集于网络，如有侵权，请联系网站删除EVOLUTION OF A COMMON FRAMEWORK OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL GUIDELINES AND STANDARDS TO GUIDE INTERNATIONAL FINANCEBy Bruce RichSenior Attorney and Director, International ProgramEnvironmental DefenseI. IntroductionThe German philosopher and theologian Hans Kung has said that the greatest challenge of our age is that a global economy requires a global ethic. This challenge is particularly urgent in the area of reconciling global economic growth and technological development with an accelerating global environmental crisis. Growing evidence of the impacts of global warming, loss of biodiversity, dwindling fresh water resourcesto name a just a few elements of this crisis-has increased the urgency of articulating an environmental framework to guide major investments in large-scale projects around the world that entail major environmental and social impacts. I mention social impacts also, since it is clear that major impacts and changes on ecosystems and natural habitats also often have adverse effects on communities and people who depend on these resources. Forced resettlement of populations caused by construction of dams is a classic example.China has emerged as a critical player for the fate of the global environment and economy for two reasons: first of all, China itself with a very substantial land area and one fifth of the worlds population is confronted with extremely serious environmental challenges of all kinds. Many Chinese NGOs have been doing a heroic job to call attention to these problems and to needed solutions. Secondlyand this is the major theme of this conference and of my introductory talkChina is quickly emerging as a major financer of large scale development projects in other parts of the world, including Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. A good number of these Chinese backed investments are in sectors with major environmental and social impacts: extractive industries (oil, gas, mining), dams and power projects. Major Chinese financers include the China Export-Import Bank, Sinosure, and the China Development Bank.The good news is that over the past two decades we have seen the emergence and development of a common framework of environmental and social policies and standards to guide most major international public and private sector large- scale project investment in developing countries and economies in transition. This framework of policies and guidelines is based to a significant degree on the environmental and social safeguard policies and guidelines of the World Bank Group. The research and advocacy of NGOs around the world, most often on specific projects, has played a very significant role in creating public awareness and political pressure that has catalyzed the evolution of this framework. NGOs realized that following the money is a very effective, and leveraged strategy for promoting greater attention to environmental and social concerns. One can directly deal with a project proponent or company, but particularly for big, risky projects, behind the company or companies stand financers, public and private banks and financial institutions. Increasingly an international consensus has evolved that financers and banks have as much responsibility for the environmental and social impacts of what they finance, as the companies that actually promote, carry out, and manage a project in question.But this international framework cannot succeed if major new players in international finance such as China do not play by the same rules. The danger is a classical situation of race to the bottom, where finance institutions with weak or no environmental and social standards, undermine the policies of institutions with stronger standards by financing the very projects these institutions reject because of major negative environmental and social impacts. This is turn creates a dynamic where competing finance institutions even feel they have to lower or abolish their environmental and social standards to compete. II. A Very Brief History of the Evolution of a Common Framework of Environmental and Social Guidelines for International Finance of Big ProjectsA. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs)The Multilateral Development Banks are public international development agencies, financed mainly by the richer industrialized nations. The oldest and most influential is the World Bank, which was founded in 1944. Subsequently other MDBs were founded to lend for development projects in specific regions such as Asia and Latin America These include the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), African Development Bank (AfDB), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Here are some figures to give you an idea of the scale of their lendingmuch of which still goes for big, environmentally sensitive projects: In 2006 the World Bank made $23.6 in new loan commitments; and for 2005 the ADB approved $7.4 billion in new loans, guarantees and grants; the IDB, $7.1 billion; AfDB, $2.9 billion; and the EBRD $5.4 billion.Partly in response to growing international pressure and protest by NGOs in both developing countries and industrialized, donor nations, the World Bank began to adopt and improve key environmental and social impact policies to guide its investments in the 1980s. (My book, Mortgaging the Earth: the World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development (Boston: Beacon Press, London: Earthscan, 1994, 1995) gives one account of this). The other MDBs adopted similar policies in the late 1980s through 1990s. In the late 1990s the World Bank extended these environmental and social safeguard policies to cover its financing and support for private sector investment. The World Banks support for private sector investment is handled by two special subsidiaries in the Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA). The IFC made some $6.7 in new loan and investment commitments in 2006. Its policy role since the late 1990s has become very influentialmuch greater than the simple volume of its lending-since it elaborated the first comprehensive international environmental and social lending guidelines for the private sector. B. Private Commercial BanksEquator PrinciplesWhen private banksalso under attack from NGOs for their environmentally negligent lending practicesbegan to look for acceptable international environmental and social guidelines they could apply to their own activities, they turned almost by default to the experience of the IFC. As the former head of Global Project Finance at Citigroup told me, why reinvent the wheel, the IFC already had practical experience with its own guidelines.In 2003 ten of the worlds leading private commercial banksincluding well known names such as Citigroup, Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) mitted to a voluntary set of environmental guidelines for financing large projects that basically adopted the World Bank/IFCs environmental and social safeguard policies for such large projects. This commitment is known as the Equator Principles () In 2005 the IFC issued a new version of its environmental and social safeguard polices, which. it called environmental and social performance standards. The Equator Principles were revised in July, 2006 to incorporate these revised IFC Performance Standards. It is important to note that now 41 of the largest banks on earth, accounting for more than 90% of global project finance, have committed themselves to implementing the Equator Principles. These Equator Principle Banks include not only the leading banks of the traditional industrialized world, but also, for example, the four biggest banks in Brazil. China has an increasing role in financing large projects in environmentally and socially sensitive areas in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, but Chinese banks so far are conspicuous by their absence from the Equator Principles. A number of Equator Principle Banks, such as Citigroup, HSBC, ABN Ambro etc. have committed to environmental policies which are even stronger than the Equator Principlesthe Equator Principles represent only a lowest common denominator that 41 international banks can agree on. (See, e.g. /citigroup/environment/initiatives.htm; /public/groupsite/csr/en/_csr_overview.jhtml; /environment/)C. Export Credit Agencies (ECAs)So far weve briefly looked of two of the three major groups of players on the map of international finance for big, environmentally significant projects: MDBs, and the worlds leading private commercial banks, most of whom have committed to follow the Equator Principles. Theres one other major grouping to complete this picture: the Export Credit Agencies,i.e. publicly supported export-import banks, which are financial institutions set up in the leading industrialized countries to provide loans, and also to guarantees and insure private bank loans and investments, with the goal of promoting the exports and investments of leading corporations based in their respective countries. Unlike the MDBs, the ECAs originally did not have a development mandate, i.e. a mandate to promote the development of other countriesthey exist to promote the development and economic welfare of exporting companies in their home countries. But unlike private commercial banks, whose prime goal is profits, these agencies are publicly supported and subsidized. The most important include the U.S. Export-Import Bank (lends $1218 billion a year on average); the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIClends about $20 to $25 billion a year); the German Euler-Hermes (Hermes Guarantee), the French COFACE, and the British Export Credits and Guarantee Department (ECGD).In the mid-1990s it became clear that projects that the World Bank and other MDBs were refusing to finance because of major environmental and social risks were being supported by ECAs. This was an absurd situation, since the same industrialized country governments that supported the MDBs, and their own bilateral (national) aid programs, which all had environmental and social guidelines, were at the same time financing projects which these agencies would rejecta classical example of one arm of government contradicting or even undermining the goals of another arm. Within the European Union there were calls for coherence between the development policies of EU Members, and their trade finance policies, i.e. ensuring that trade finance did not undermine the sustainable development goals of bilateral and multilateral aid.At that time one of the most controversial projects that set off a widespread international debate was the Three Gorges Dam in China: the World Bank told Chinese authorities not to approach them for financing, since the environmental and social risks of the project were too great. The U.S. Export Import Bank, which by the mid-1990s was required by the U.S. Congress to conduct environmental assessments for big projects and to take into account certain social impacts of such projects, such as resettlement, refused also to finance the project because of lack of sufficient information on the environmental impacts and mitigation measures. But other ECAs, from Germany, Canada and several other European countries rushed in with many hundreds of millions of dollars of financial support to subsidize sales of their companies for the Three Gorges Project.This led to a movement in the U.S. Senate to eliminate consideration of environmental concerns by the U.S. Export Import Bank for big competitive projects. The rationale was the project goes ahead anyway, and all these environmental guidelines mean is that we lose contracts to Japan, German and others with lower standards-a classic example of a race to the bottom which Environmental Defense and other groups only narrowly headed off by getting sympathetic Senators to intervene.At the same time, a growing international NGO campaign emerged, criticizing specific ECA-financed projects and calling for major environmental and social reforms. The Campaign included, and includes, not just NGOs from industrialized nations, but NGO movements in developing nations such as Indonesia. The best web site for information on ECAsnot just information on NGO campaigns, but on the ECAs themselvesis .To make a long story short, President Clinton then raised the issue of common environmental standards for export finance at the G8 Global Economic Summits in the late 1990s, leading to an international agreement for environmental standards for ECAs in 2003. This agreement was negotiated in the OECDthe Paris based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is both a kind of economic think tank, and a negotiating forum for the 26 member nations of the OECD. The 26 member nations are basically the major and minor sized industrialized nations, with three newly industrializing members: Korea, Turkey, and Mexico. The 2003 ECA environmental agreement is called Common Approaches on Environment and Officially Supported Export Credits. (web link: /olis/2005doc.nsf/Linkto/td-ecg(2005)3; see generally/topic/0,2686,en_2649_34181_1_1_1_1_37431,00.html)In recent years the OECD has increasingly engaged China to participate as an observer in a number of its proceedings, including over the past year or two, meetings of the OECD Export Credit Group, the technical name for the forum where OECD ECAs meet, discuss and negotiate various issues.It is important to note that the 2003 Common Approaches on Environment agreement was only a first step: the OECD ECAs committed to conduct basic elements of Environmental Assessment for projects with significant impacts, and referenced some (but not most) of the World Bank environmental and social safeguard policies (including important ones on dealing with resettlement of populations by big projects and protecting the rights and interests of indigenous peoples). Nonetheless, starting one could argue from a very low level of environmental awareness, significant progress has been made: since 2003 almost all of the OECD ECAs have issued new environmental review procedures to comply with the Common Approaches, and most have hired special environmental staff to deal with these procedures. Also important to note: while the 2003 Common Approaches is a separate agreement, the World Bank environmental and social safeguard policies were really the main point of reference for much of the content of the Agreement. For example, the 2003 Common Approaches contain an Annex which outlines the main elements of what issues are expected to be covered in an environmental assessment, and that Annex is adopted from the main World Bank Safeguard Policy on Environmental Assessment, known as Operational Policy (OP) 4.01.Now negotiations are continuing as I speak in the OECD Export Credit Group for a revised, strengthened agreement on Common Approaches to Environment for ECAs. NGOs have prepared and forwarded technical comments on the working draft of the agreement. For updates, I urge you to look at the eca-watch website.III. Short Observations on Technical Aspects of the Emerging Common International Framework of Good Practice Guidelines and Standards to Guide International FinanceMuch of this Conference will examine in more detail the World Bank Safeguard Policies and IFC Peformance Standards, ADB environmental and social policies (which are similar or analogous to those of the World Bank) as well as the Equator Principles and the environmental procedures of major ECAs, which are supposed to conform with the OECD agreement on Common Approaches to Environment. But here are a few points: There are ten World Bank environmental and social safeguard policies: Environmental Assessment (OP/BP 4.01); Involuntary Resettlement (OP/BP 4.12);Indigenous People (OP/BP 4.10); Natural Habitats (OP/BP 4.04); Forests (OP/BP 4.36; Pest Management (OP/BP 4.09); Cultural Property (OP/BP 11.03); Safety of Dams (OP/BP 4.37); International Waterways (OP/BP 7.50); Disputed Ares (OP/BP 7.60). OP stands for Operational Policy; BP refers to supplementary interpretive material known as Best Practices for each OP. (web link: /WBSITE/EXTERNAL/PROJECTS/EXTPOLICIES/EXTSAFEPOL/0,menuPK:584441pagePK:64168427piPK:64168435theSitePK:584435,00.html) These policies traditionally have been used for World Bank lending to governments and government agencies, but have also served as the basis for the IFC policies, the most recent version of which are the IFC Performance Standards. (web link: /ifcext/enviro.nsf/Content/PerformanceStandards) By far the most important is the Environmental Assessment Policy, OP/BP 4.01, since it encompasses the other policies, which are applied if in the environmental assessment process the issues which they address are identified, i.e. presence of indigenous peoples, disruption of natural habitats, needed resettlement of populations etc. OP 4.01 on Environmental Assessment also incorporates by reference a comprehensive set of air and water pollution standards, which are set out in the World Bank Pollution Abatement and Prevention Handbook. (web link: /ESSD/envext.nsf/51ByDocName/PollutionPreventionandAbatementHandbook)Critical social impacts are covered by two of the World Bank safeguard policies, the ones on Involuntary Resettlement (think of the 1.5 million people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam) and Indigenous Peoples (an issue that would be critical for major projects that the World Bank would be asked to finance, fo