Environment and Natural Resources Initiatives

The Bank has a long history of supporting countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to strengthen their environmental frameworks, including their environmental safeguard laws and national management systems to protect a healthy environment. In this respect, the Bank has financed initiatives to reinforce the rule of law and the institutional capacity of environmental agencies all over the region. Most importantly, the Bank has supported efforts to measure how these frameworks' implementation work in practice and how they impact the environmental outcomes of these countries.  

The Environmental Governance Indicators for Latin America and the Caribbean represent the first-ever initiative to measure environmental governance indicators for several countries and to draw conclusions about the connection between the environmental laws, environmental institutions, and the environmental outcomes.   

The IDB understands the importance of accounting the contributions of the environment to the economy and how this can impact decision-making in the region. In this regard, the Bank has been promoting the use of innovative tools, like the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling Platform (IEEM), to evaluate and demonstrate how accounting for the contributions of the environment to the economy in public policy and investment can lead to substantially different policy recommendations. Contrary to traditional economic metrics, the IEEM methodology can be effective in capturing policy impacts on the three dimensions of sustainable development and wealth. The IEEM has now been applied to a diverse portfolio of Bank investments and has been instrumental to positively shift the direction of some policies in the region. 

The IDB has been a champion in the region for strengthening coastal and maritime policies, particularly for countries whose economies are closely linked to environmental quality in the coastal zone, like the Caribbean. While, for the past 30 years, the focus has been on establishing programs for the integrated management of coastal and marine areas, and thus, on enhancing its value for a sustainable development trajectory of the region, more recently, the Bank has enlarged its scope to consider the particular vulnerabilities of coastal and marine resources to climate change, in addition to tailoring its coastal and marine resources operations to the social and economic growth challenges of the LAC countries. By promoting ocean wealth, while at the same time protecting its resources from pollution, overfishing, and climate change, among other risks, the Bank is working to enhance the ocean’s resilience and sustainability for years to come.