EVERIS AEROESPACIAL Y DEFENSA S.L.U (ES)
EO Clinic support requested by: World Bank Group (WBG) Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation Global Practice (FCI GP), Long Term Finance Unit (EFNLT)
Requesting activity: Natural Wealth and Sovereign Risk
Requesting activity type: Other: Global Program on Sustainability (GPS)
EO Clinic relevant Thematic Groups: TG1 (Agriculture), TG11 (Non-EO Information and Analytics)
Work Order number: EOC0008
Work Order status: Completed
Work Order start: 2020 Jul 15
Work Order end: 2020 Oct 05
A well-developed financial sector that enables long-term financing for countries’ strategic sectors– government, SMEs and corporates, physical infrastructure & housing, and agriculture – is crucial for inclusive economic growth and for achieving the World Bank Group’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The activities of the Term Finance Unit (EFNLT) within the World Bank’s Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation Global Practice (FCI GP) assist in bridging funding gaps for these key strategic sectors by developing capital markets and increasing the supply of institutional investors’ assets (primarily pensions and insurance) to fund long-term investments in strategic sectors such as infrastructure, housing and agriculture.
The World Bank’s Global Program on Sustainability (GPS) aims to integrate environmental and other sustainability considerations into public and private decisions, by providing policy makers and the financial sector with the necessary metrics and tools. This approach involves looking beyond GDP and traditional financial metrics to include accounting for environmental risks and opportunities and valuing natural capital and ecosystem services.
Within the proposed activity “Natural Wealth and Sovereign Risk”, EFNLT aims to conduct assessments on how environmental risks impact the financial sectors of different countries. The project plans to use data from various sources, including on agricultural crop types and crop health, to bring more detail into existing sovereign Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data. This aims to build on WAVES, a GPS precursor activity, as part of an ongoing donor-funded program that has been renewed for the next 3 years.
The information gaps in the scope of the present World Bank support request are related to agricultural crop status and crop health, compared across countries. At the moment the related data available to the bank team is often inconsistent, not sufficiently granular and not made available with a sufficient frequency. The bank team currently only has country-level wealth data on an annual frequency to compare crop data to. These are highly aggregated and modelled such that direct comparisons are difficult.
