The World Bank is facing calls for far-reaching climate finance reform and vulnerable countries are demanding climate reparations as the clock ticks down to the annual United Nations climate summit, COP 27, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

The Bank’s annual meeting in Washington last week saw a major push for clean energy finance, driven in part by controversy over the views of its climate-denying president, American economist and Trump administration appointee David Malpass. “Malpass apologized for his late September remarks downplaying the effect humans and fossil fuels have on climate change, but they provided an opening for global leaders to act on longstanding frustrations with the World Bank’s efforts to accelerate renewable energy projects,” Politico Europe reports.

“Institutions like the World Bank, as admirable as their founding intentions are, were not set up with the purpose of tackling an existential climate crisis. Today, climate must be at the heart of everything that we do,” COP 26 President Alok Sharma said Friday. “The world cannot afford for such institutions to be cautious in how their considerable resources are deployed to tackle the climate crisis.”

Many of the major contributors to the World Bank “have called for varying degrees of change, with one consistent demand: That the Bank deliver more finance to fund the clean energy transition, especially in emerging economies whose growing energy consumption puts meeting global climate goals at risk,” Politico writes. Climate Home News says that momentum came together in a joint proposal, led by Germany and the United States, in which 10 countries called for a “fundamental reform” at the Bank.

“The World Bank needs to restructure to address the global challenges of the future,” German Development Minister Svenja Schulze said in a release. “Its current model, which is mainly based on demand from borrowing countries, is no longer appropriate in this time of global crises. Challenges and investment needs are so great that the model needs to be adjusted.”

Specifics included incentives for countries to use the funds they borrow to address global challenges, better terms for loans that address the climate and biodiversity crises, and either preferential rates or “targeted budget support” for efforts to drive down greenhouse gas emissions.

“Social protection is the best form of crisis preparedness,” Schulze added, citing the COVID-19 pandemic as an object lesson. “However, at present there are four billion people—about half of the global population—who have no social safety net to fall back on. If they lose their income, if their home is destroyed, if they are faced with disability or become unable to work, they have to fend for themselves.”

Up to now, the World Bank has lagged behind other multilateral development banks in the share of its loans and grants to developing countries dedicated to climate, Climate Home says. Analysis by the Big Shift coalition has the Bank handing nearly US$15 billion in financing over to fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement was adopted, and “while it has committed to end financing coal as well as oil and gas extraction, its subsidiaries are still backing fossil fuel projects.”

Oxfam International reported earlier this month that the Bank could be under- or overestimating the $17.2-billion it says it devoted to climate finance in 2020 by as much as 40%, or $7 billion. “The World Bank’s public disclosure of its climate finance is like a faulty thermometer that’s currently reading 17.2 billion,” said Oxfam climate policy lead Nafkote Dabi. “We found that it could be off by 40% in either direction, and we simply can’t be sure of the actual value. Our concern is the worst-case scenario—that the Bank could be significantly overstating its contribution.”

With a new line of thinking from major funders last week, “larger middle income countries suddenly spy an opportunity for below market rate finance from the World Bank’s group of lenders, which is normally only available to the poorest countries,” Politico writes. “But some nations, particularly those in Africa, have viewed the calls to focus on renewable energy skeptically over fears it could also come with demands to strangle investment in domestic gas reserves they want to tap.”

Last week, as well, a group of 20 vulnerable countries floated the idea of suspending repayment of World Bank debts totalling $685 billion and directing the funds to climate projects. “Finance ministers are calling instead for a debt-for-nature swap, in which part of a nation’s debt is forgiven and invested in conservation,” the New York Times reports.

“We are living not just on borrowed money but on borrowed time,” said former Maldives president Mohamad. Nasheed, who famously held a cabinet meeting underwater in 2009 to draw global attention to sea level rise and its impacts. “We are under threat, and we should collectively find a way out of it.”

With COP 27 just three weeks away, countries in the Global South are also calling for reparations for the loss and damage they’ve experienced due to the climate emergency, Grist reports. Scotland, which stepped up with loss and damage funding in a decisive moment at last year’s COP 26 summit in Glasgow, is declaring those reparations a “moral responsibility”, the U.S.-based climate newsletter adds.

“The countries most vulnerable to climate change claim they have lost a fifth of their wealth due to climate change-driven increases in temperature and inconsistent rainfall patterns over the last 20 years,” Grist writes. “The result is a widespread loss of livelihood and displacement that’s only accelerating as temperatures rise. What’s more, these losses are primarily suffered by low- and middle-income nations that were late to industrialize, and therefore did little to contribute to global warming historically.”

Grist combines a searing account of climate impacts in Bangladesh with a chronology of international loss and damage negotiations and (under)funding dating back to 2007, culminating in stalled discussions at COP 26. In Sharm el-Sheikh, developing countries and civil society groups will be making the case that “climate is a justice issue,” said Harjeet Singh, the head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network-International.

“A bunch of countries and corporations are responsible for the mess,” he told Grist. “They have to bloody clean it up. As simple as that.”