After many years of criticism of its weak environmental protection standards and footdragging on the possibility of having its 1979 environmental policy updated, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) recently released its revised Environment policy. Formally titled “Environment and Safeguards Compliance,” the operational policy was approved by the IDB Board of Executive Directors on January 19, 2006 and is now the only mandatory set of rules that determines how the IDB must take environmental issues and potential environmental impacts into consideration when developing new policies and financing new projects in Latin America.
The previous two-page Environment Policy (OP-703), approved in 1979, was severely outdated and was one of the weakest among those of all the multilateral development banks. In 1994, during the IDB’s eighth replenishment of funds, the IDB Board of Governors committed Bank management to adopt an improved environmental policy. Almost ten years later, in 2003, the IDB developed and approved a document which outlined its general priorities and approaches to environmental issues, called the Environment Strategy (GN-2208-4). These general priorities were then translated into binding rules outlined in the Environment and Safeguards Compliance policy.
Read the new Environment and Safeguards Compliance Operational Policy | Also available: Español (IDB website)
Check this page again in the near future for a more concise analysis of the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the revised policy, which will be posted shortly.