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"We Need to Be Good Ancestors": Experts Weigh in on New Incentives to Invest in Global Solutions

World Bank Group

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The World Bank's new Framework for Financial Incentives represents a fundamental shift in how countries can address shared global challenges—be it pandemics, biodiversity loss or regional water crises. That is according to three experts in global development.

Summary

This framework establishes financial incentives for middle-income countries to invest in global public goods, such as pandemic preparedness and biodiversity conservation, which are critical components of global catastrophic risk mitigation. By offering lower interest rates and strategic grants, the World Bank aims to eliminate the trade-off between national development and global safety responsibilities. While the current focus is on biological and ecological threats, this model provides a scalable governance template for addressing other interconnected global risks, potentially including the safe development and containment of advanced AI systems. The shift emphasizes long-term institutional thinking required to safeguard future generations from systemic, cross-border failures.

Body

Launched in February 2025, the World Bank's Framework for Financial Incentives offers countries a powerful package of benefits—more financing, longer repayment periods, and lower interest rates—when their projects deliver benefits that extend beyond their own borders. The FFI rewards middle-income countries for scaling up investments in pandemic preparedness, biodiversity conservation, and cross-border water management while pursuing their national development priorities.Through the FFI’s Livable Planet Fund, middle-income countries—home to 75% of the world's population and holding most of the world's biodiversity hotspots—now have access strategic grants that make ambitious cross-border projects financially viable.For decades, the question has lingered: who pays to protect our shared planet? "Global public goods is now such an interesting concept because it essentially starts to recognize that we are in a single world," explains Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Development in any country also has implications for how other countries develop."World Bank FFI Projects A snapshot of projects approved under the World Bank’s FFI as of October 2025. (View full size.)What makes the World Bank's new Framework for Financial Incentives (FFI) revolutionary, according to Kharas, is how it eliminates this traditional trade-off between national development and global responsibility."The beauty of these kinds of programs is that it takes away this notion of a trade-off," Kharas explains. "For the finance minister the question is never going to be 'either do this or do that.' The question is: if you do this in this way, then you can actually do better for your own country and better for the world."