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DEVELOPMENT IN A TIME OF GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCEBoosting economic growth and creating jobs in fragile settings is an urgent task. Our economists project that if economic growth merely mirrors the average growth rate of the last decade, we would reduce extreme poverty globally to only 6 percent in 2030. And that would mean that in the most fragile states, the poverty rate would remain extraordinarily high: 47 percent of the population. All of Europe and all of Germany are rightly focused on the refugee crisis on the continent today, but if fragile states still have 47 percent of their people living on less than 2 euros a day by 2030, while the developed world prospers, the flow of migrants and refugees will not stop.As daunting as the refugee crisis appears at the moment, we must not forget that the world faces other major threats that undermine developing and developed countries alike – two of the most pressing ones are climate change and the threat of a future pandemic.Credible sources have argued that successive droughts in Syria played a role in the current crisis, and there is no doubt that climate change is contributing to rising tension and the loss of livelihoods in many parts of the world due to water scarcity, rising tides, and the increasing number of extreme weather events.The global temperatures for January and February both broke records. The data – compiled by NASA – found that the average global surface temperature in February was 1.35 degrees Celsius warmer than the average temperature for the month of February during an earlier 30-year period, a far bigger margin than ever seen before. Even the North Pole was warm – in late December the temperature approached 0 degrees Celsius, or more than 30 degrees Celsius above average.In advance of the COP21 climate summit in Paris in December, the World Bank Group pledged to increase our climate financing by as much as a third by 2020 – up to US$29 billion dollars a year. Global leaders surprised even the optimists by agreeing at COP21 that the world should aspire to hold global temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Chancellor Merkel deserves great credit – along with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, French President Hollande, and President Obama, among others – for pushing and prodding so many governments and institutions, the World Bank Group included, to do their part.Now that we have the Agreement, we have to work with unprecedented urgency if we are to have any chance to reach the targets. I have learned on two recent trips – one to Pakistan and one to Vietnam – that we have to move even more quickly than I had thought. Both Vietnam and Pakistan are moving forward with their plans to build coal-fired power plants – in Vietnam, they are planning to install 40GW of coal fired power, roughly the equivalent of half of all the energy currently available in sub-Saharan Africa. Why? Because the price for coal-fired power is currently cheaper than renewables – 9 to 10 cents a kilowatt hour for coal and 11-12 cents for solar and wind in both countries. In Mexico, Peru, the United Arab Emirates, and many others parts of the world, we have shown that with innovative financing that crowds in the private sector, we can help make the switch to cleaner energy by creating overwhelming financial incentives “ NOW THAT WE HAVE THE AGREEMENT, WE HAVE TO WOR WITH UNPRECEDENTED URGENCY”DR JIM YONG KIM, PRESIDENT, THE WORLD BANK GROUP044 FINANCE AND INVESTMENT