EIB, 8 banks to raise annual climate finance by 2025

New York, Sep 23 (IANS) The European Investment Bank (EIB), together with eight other multilateral development banks like the Asian Development Bank, pledged at the UN Secretary-General's Climate Action Summit to raise their annual global climate action investment to $175 billion by 2025.

This increase would notably focus on low and middle-income economies and on climate adaptation.

To reach their target, the multilateral development banks intend to strengthen partnerships, particularly with private sector investors, to optimise the impact of their climate finance.

Rising to $110 billion, co-financing is indeed expected to represent almost two-thirds of the total $175 billion planned for climate financing by 2025.

This would include $40 billion mobilised from private sector investors.

EIB President Werner Hoyer said: "As a public financial institution, we have a major role to play in making our economies carbon-neutral, greener, climate resilient and more inclusive.

"We must lead by example, by showing unprecedented ambition with our own investments and by facilitating the flow of private capital into sustainable investments at the needed scale globally.

"This is what we are doing now, all multilateral development banks together, with this new commitment. To significantly step up our climate finance for this fight we need to better mobilise private investment. This is the key to make a real impact."

Multilateral development banks have been leading climate action for more than a decade to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit the increase in global temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius, pursuing efforts for 1.5 degrees.

The banks' collective efforts already demonstrated by the record level of climate finance and co-finance with $111 billion reached in 2018 in developing countries and emerging economies.

Besides the Asian Development Bank, multilateral development banks comprise the African Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank Group, the Islamic Development Bank, the New Development Bank and the World Bank Group.