Why Australia may no longer be ‘God’s country’, according to Ajay Banga. Amen

Australia, in the words of the World Bank’s president, Ajay Banga, is “God’s country”. But he’s pleased that he took his family to see the Great Barrier Reef in the 1990s, before chronic coral bleaching set in.

The Indian-born US citizen and former global chief executive of Mastercard is more familiar with Australia than any of the bank’s heads since the Australian-born financier Jim Wolfensohn was appointed “banker to the poor” by Bill Clinton in 1995.

Illustration: Joe BenkeCredit:

Banga has not only visited most of the cities of Australia over the course of his career with several multinational companies, he’s probably the only member of the Washington power set who can say he’s been to Warrnambool. And he knows enough about Australian iconoclasm to not expect us to call him by his job title.

“Call me Ajay [pronounced Ah-jay],” he says. “No Australian should call me Mr President or Mr Banga.”

From his first trip, Australia wowed him. “I came back saying, ‘This is God’s country, gifted from nature.’ Australia has it. America has it. These are countries that are gifted in their geography by having water, mountains, desert, farming, forestry and open spaces.”

His visit to the Great Barrier Reef was “the most mind-blowing experience”. But now, as he heads to Australia for his first visit as the head of the World Bank after a year in the job, he points to the reef as an indicator of encroaching harm inflicted by climate change: “While the Pacific islands are close by and will get hurt, probably quite substantially, by climate change, Australia itself is exposed to climate change.

“I mean, look what’s happening to your Great Barrier Reef.” Australia, “gifted from nature, that won’t be the case if this carries on”.

In stark contrast to his predecessor at the World Bank, Banga is a warrior in the cause of confronting climate change. The bank, together with the International Monetary Fund, was born of the Bretton Woods conference between the Western allies in the 1940s that designed the institutional architecture of the postwar world. One of the system’s unwritten conventions is that the US appoints the head of the World Bank, charged with lifting the poorest nations out of poverty. And the Europeans get to choose the head of the IMF, whose job is to prevent crisis-stricken countries from falling into insolvency.

As imperfect as both these Washington-based institutions have been, it’s often remarked that, if they didn’t exist, they’d need to be invented. Banga likes to point to the fact that while there are 75 developing countries receiving support from the bank’s facility for the poorest nations, the so-called International Development Association, 36 countries have graduated from it.

“The first recipients of IDA were Japan, Korea, India, Turkey, Mexico,” he says. Not that the World Bank can take all the credit for their economic improvement, he readily concedes, but it gave them all “a leg-up”.

The World Bank’s last chief, David Malpass, was appointed by the Trump administration, so it was not a total surprise that he was a climate sceptic. This limited his relevance to the agendas of many governments.

Banga, however, was appointed by the Biden administration, partly because he is a climate changemaker. Armed with financial firepower of $US91 billion a year in grants and loans, named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2024, he’s a “close ally” of US Vice President Kamala Harris, according to The New York Times, and a climate pathbreaker.

The bank is the world’s biggest financier of climate-related projects, with $US29.4 billion allocated last financial year and over $US40 billion this year.

Banga has written it into the bank’s motto. The World Bank’s longstanding aspiration of “a world free of poverty” has acquired an additional clause – “on a liveable planet”.

His visit to Australia next week also will take him to the Pacific island states, some of which are frontline victims of rising sea levels. With encouragement from Australian ministers, he’ll be the first World Bank chief to visit Fiji in 50 years and the first ever to visit tiny Tuvalu, population 10,000.

Banga is keen to co-ordinate with Australia to “align” investments in the region, and he’s seeking an Australian contribution to do so. The bank is restocking its IDA for the next three years.

The bank has been active in the Pacific for decades to help lift living standards, with $US2.8 billion committed to projects ranging from tuberculosis treatment in PNG to electrification in the Solomons and fibre-optic undersea cable connections for half a dozen nations.

And now Banga plans to convene Pacific island leaders to learn how the bank can help them deal with climate change. But he’s not a “climate only” ideologue. He sees it as an inextricable part of helping maintain societies as “functional, living ecosystems for people”. Central to that, he says, is creating jobs, and with jobs comes training, dignity and hope. Without all of that, the youth of some of these countries will simply leave and societies fall apart.

But is it already too late? The new Australian treaty with Tuvalu embodies an unspoken resignation to the fearful fragility of the most exposed nations. The Falepili Union, which took effect on Wednesday, commits Australia to the defence of Tuvalu but also provides for a slow-motion national evacuation, the first treaty of its kind.

Australia also pledges to continue to recognise the existing borders and maritime territories of Tuvalu even if it disappears entirely beneath the Pacific. The average elevation of the South West Pacific island states is one to two metres, putting them partly underwater with every storm surge.

For Tuvalu, Kiribati and Nauru, the balmy Pacific breeze is chill with the rising reality that they are likely ephemeral nations. A phrase in increasing currency in the region is “migration with dignity”.

“You only have two options,” Banga tells me. “Option one is a bad option, to say it’s inevitable, you can’t change it. Option two is to say they deserve a chance. And in that option, you have to assess whether technologically and financially, this is a winnable fight, and the best way to think about it is to think in terms of resilient infrastructure.”

So is it winnable? He cites the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: “It will tell you that even if we do the energy transition right … we still have to get right heavy-metals manufacturing – you know, steel, copper, all that is very heavy, energy-intensive. We have to get heavy transport right. After all, trucks, ships, airplanes, all use fossil fuels.

“We have to get agriculture and livestock right, methane, basically. Even if you get all that right, most likely, we’re going to blow through the Paris goals.”

Is it time to despair? No, he says, but the Potsdam research says the world will need carbon capture, a technology still unproven, on a grand scale, to start retrenching carbon that already exists in the atmosphere.

“So my belief is that we’re not yet at a point where we’ve lost,” says Banga, but “we are at a point where the public debate must go on scientific basis, and acknowledge some harsh realities of how we need to get this through the next few years.”

The science says that “we have to start doing this now; my view is, if mankind decides to go at this, we will figure it out in the coming years”. At what cost? At a manageable cost, posits Banga.

He offers two revolutionary ideas. One is that the current $US1.5 trillion subsidies that governments give to fossil fuels can be repurposed. He points out a model: the EU used to pay farmers €60 billion a year to use fertiliser; it’s reversed course and now pays them €60 billion euros a year to cut fertiliser use. “It’s brilliant,” says Banga, and it hints at a possible restructuring of fossil fuel subsidies.

The other is that more trillions, not billions, of dollars are needed to deal with the climate transition, and the only place to find such sums is the private sector. And to entice private funds into poor countries, they need to be offered a commercial return.

He has set up a “private sector lab” drawing on the advice of 15 leading chief executives, including the Macquarie Bank’s chief, Shemara Wikramanayake, to figure out how to do so. The subject animates Banga. The World Bank is now working through the group’s recommendations.

God help him.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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