The United States traditionally selects the bank’s president, who serves a five-year term that can be renewed once. Other nations can submit their own candidates, and countries have until Thursday to offer a nominee. So far, no foreign leader has publicly opposed Mr. Malpass or thrown support behind a different candidate.

While Mr. Malpass hails from the Trump administration, those who know him said they did not expect him to parrot the president’s views.

“I was kind of surprised that Trump nominated him for the job, because while he supported Trump and worked at Treasury under Mnuchin, he is not what you would call a Trumpite,” said Steve Bell, a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee who hired Mr. Malpass in the 1980s. “He’s not going to go in there and do crazy things.”

The bank was conceived in 1944 to help with postwar reconstruction in Europe. It later shifted its attention to eradicating poverty in developing countries, education and public health. While the bank has received less attention in recent years, its lending has continued to grow.

Over the last decade, addressing climate change has become a major part of the World Bank’s portfolio as scientific evidence of the impact of rising global temperatures mounted and vulnerable nations sought new sources of funding to protect themselves from rising sea levels and fierce storms. Under Jim Yong Kim, who stepped down in January after serving six years as president, the World Bank became a global leader on environmental matters.

Last year, the bank provided $20.5 billion in financing for climate change efforts, which amounted to just over one-third of the institution’s overall support to developing countries. Much of that money went toward renewable energy development, agriculture investments to help farmers increase crop yields amid changing weather patterns and efforts to help countries meet the pledges they made to cut planet-warming emissions under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The World Bank has also developed a vast body of research devoted to understanding how the rise in global temperatures could keep millions of people worldwide trapped in poverty. In 2013, after a bruising battle between rich and poor nations over addressing one of the main causes of climate change, the bank drastically restricted lending for coal-fired power plants.