US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and a top White House adviser called for major reforms at the World Bank on Thursday, saying the seven-decade-old multilateral development bank was not built to address multiple and overlapping global crises.

Yellen told reporters that both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were not designed to handle the multiple global crises they now face, including fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic, and they lack the resources to tackle climate change.

Yellen said the IMF, which has about $US1 trillion ($1.35 trillion) in total lending resources, was intended to help individual countries deal with isolated crises, while the World Bank was created to finance development projects in countries that lacked access to capital markets.

“We face challenges that will now require investment on a scale that an international institution can’t manage on its own, like climate change,” Yellen said. “The investments for climate change will add up to just trillions and trillions of dollars.”

She said she could not say what reforms are needed to scale up the institutions, but she added that they needed to be able to harness large pools of private capital.

The World Bank’s lending totalled $US99 billion in fiscal 2021.

The institutions also need to be better capable of delivering “public goods” such as improved public health infrastructure to handle future pandemics, which may require alterations to the World Bank’s mandate.

In separate remarks, Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh said he was in “full throated agreement” with Yellen, and believed the bank’s business model - which puts a premium on maintaining a AAA credit rating - was not well-suited to catalysing global change.

“It’s really past time to reimagine, and reboot the mission and the business model of the World Bank,” Singh told an event hosted by the Bretton Woods Committee.