BANGKOK, Thailand – The World Bank Group (WBG) cannot continue burning its way to impunity. As the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings draw to a close, communities and civil society organizations are challenging a financial system that locks countries into debt, bankrolls harmful projects, and rebrands false solutions as climate action-all while communities and the environment bear the cost.
This year’s Annual Meetings coincided with the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA)’s Global Week of Action to Stop Incineration , a global series of solidarity events highlighting community resistance to waste incineration. In conjunction with the campaign, GAIA Asia Pacific released its findings on the Citizens Atlas on False Climate and Circularity Solutions .
From January 2015 to August 2026, the WBG approved US$35.89 billion across 59 projects identified as false solutions-initiatives that fail to tackle pollution and climate change while potentially harming human or ecosystem health, delaying production reduction measures, or disregarding the conservation of material resources. Of these, 40 involved loans totaling US$34.23 billion, or 95% of the total approved amount, adding to countries’ debt burdens. Waste incineration features prominently in this financing. Forty-two of the 59 projects include waste incineration components, such as municipal waste-to-energy (WTE) incinerators, pyrolysis, or gasification. Another 10 involve refused-derived fuel or processed waste burned in incinerators, cement kilns, and other industrial facilities.
The findings also expose gaps in protecting communities and workers. Eighteen projects are classified as high-risk Category A, indicating potentially significant, sensitive, irreversible, or unprecedented adverse environmental and social impacts. Yet only 15 projects mention or include plans addressing waste workers’ concerns, and just six have a Resettlement Action Plan or equivalent, raising questions about the interests behind climate finance when billions flow to projects that risk harming communities while protections for affected people remain inadequate.
Communities pay the price for false solutions
The concerns raised by GAIA Asia Pacific’s research echoed throughout civil society events held alongside the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings. Community leaders, environmental defenders, and civil society organizations shared their experiences of harmful projects and policies, including persistent lack of transparency, exclusion from decision-making, public funds diverted from essential social services toward debt repayment, human rights abuses, and environmental destruction.
Anora Madrid, a youth leader from the Manila Anti-Incinerator Alliance, brought these struggles to several events, speaking about the World Bank-initiated Smokey Mountain WTE project in Manila, Philippines. The proposed project threatens around 67,000 affected residents, with 300 families facing displacement, the loss of livelihoods of 15,000 waste workers, and potential health and environmental impacts. Madrid also shared that community members are already experiencing threats of harassment and intimidation amid efforts to clear the way for the development.
Despite being promoted as a solution to the Philippines’ waste and energy crises, incineration can pollute the environment, threaten public health, and lock communities into decades of waste burning instead of prioritizing waste prevention and reduction. Calling a project “clean energy” or “climate action” does not make it a real solution. When investments fail to address pollution at its source, they risk diverting public resources from effective alternatives while forcing communities to bear the consequences.
Financing the crisis
While debt burdens, ecological destruction and climate change echoed in the IMF-WB Annual Meetings, civil society groups said International financial institutions (IFIs) are financing both ends of the climate and pollution crisis. During GAIA Asia Pacific’s session, Follow the Money: Who Pays for False Solutions in Circular Economy and Climate Action , co-organized with the International Accountability Project and the Center for Financial Accountability, new data exposed the scale of IFI’s financing for the petrochemical industry, which refines fossil fuels into inputs used to produce plastics.
According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA)’s Global MDB Investments in Petrochemicals Tracker, US$10.042 billion was tracked across 93 petrochemical projects financed by 16 IFIs with the WBG accounting for 65.7% of the tracked investment.
Both studies show how IFIs are expanding petrochemical production upstream while bankrolling incineration and other false solutions downstream. This cycle of financing plastic production and then financing the burning of its waste locks countries into polluting technologies while diverting resources from prevention, reuse, and other Zero Waste solutions.
During GAIA Asia Pacific’s The Year We Fought the Fire webinar, participants questioned whether the WBG and other international financial institutions are investing in genuine solutions. They highlighted the stark imbalance between financing for petrochemical expansion and false solutions and the comparatively minimal funding directed toward Zero Waste.
Stop financing false solutions. Zero Waste Finance.
GAIA Asia Pacific calls on the World Bank Group and other international financial institutions to take three urgent steps:
1. Stop financing incineration. Exclude incineration from international climate and development finance, and end subsidies that lock countries into decades of waste burning and threaten communities’ rights.
2. Stop corporate abuse. Hold corporations and project developers accountable for exporting incineration to the Global South. Guarantee affected communities access to information, meaningful participation in decision-making, effective grievance mechanism and remedies, and accountability.
3. Zero Waste Finance. Redirect public and climate finance toward people-centered Zero Waste systems that prevent pollution at its source, protect waste workers and their livelihoods, and support waste prevention, reuse, recycling, composting, and other decentralized solutions.
Statements from GAIA members who attended the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings:
“The World Bank and IMF meetings showed how little room people have in decisions that shape their lives. The International People’s Assembly and the Regional Learning Exchange showed what they are doing about it: organizing across borders, sharing strategies and building alternatives of their own. The task now is to take that energy home and turn it into sustained campaigns.” -Haripriya Hasan, Center for Financial Accountability
“Large-scale projects deprive people who depend on natural resources of their livelihoods. Since very few people secure employment through these projects, institutions like the World Bank should develop a mechanism that enables local people to carry out monitoring. Companies operate with massive funds, yet they cause significant pollution damage, and people are unable to lodge complaints with the World Bank.” -Mahesh Pandya, Paryavaran Mitra
“The World Bank should fund effective, just, and locally appropriate climate solutions-not merely projects labeled as climate finance. Grievance mechanisms must be independent, accessible, and capable of delivering actual redress, while environmental defenders and affected communities must be protected from criminalization and intimidation.” -Rariq Muhammad, Indonesian Center for Environmental Law
GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 1,000 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 100 countries. With our work, we aim to catalyze a global shift towards environmental justice by strengthening grassroots social movements that advance solutions to waste and pollution. We envision a just, zero-waste world built on respect for ecological limits and community rights, where people are free from the burden of toxic pollution, and resources are sustainably conserved, not burned or dumped.
