AfDB pledges $25bn to climate finance for 2020-2025, doubling commitments
The African Development Bank will double its climate finance commitments for the period 2020-2025, the bank’s president announced last week at the One Planet Summit in Nairobi, Kenya.
Dr Akinwumi Adesina said the bank would commit at least $25 billion towards climate finance.
Speaking at a plenary in the presence of Heads of State, including President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, and French President Emmanuel Macron, Adesina also announced that the bank is on course to achieve its target of allocating 40% of its funding to climate finance by 2020, a year ahead.
The bank’s commitment on the target, the highest among all multilateral development banks, has progressed steadily from 9% in 2016 to 28% in 2017 and 32% in 2018.
Considering Africa’s high vulnerability despite contributing the least to climate change, the African Development Bank has successfully raised its adaptation finance from less than 30% of total climate finance to parity with mitigation in 2018. The bank will continue this trend into the future.
“The required level of financing is only feasible with the direct involvement of the entire financial sector,” said Adesina. “Consequently, the bank launched the African Financial Alliance for Climate Change (AFAC) to link all stock exchanges, pension and sovereign wealth funds, central banks and other financial institutions of Africa to mobilize and incentivize the shift of their portfolios towards low carbon and climate resilient investments.”
The bank made another milestone announcement: “It is not good enough to simply ask countries to stay away from polluting technologies,” Adesina said, adding “We have to be proactive in exploring alternatives. We will therefore be launching the ‘green baseload’ facility under the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA 2.0) to provide concessional finance and technical assistance to support the penetration and scale-up of renewable energy, to provide affordable and reliable renewable energy baseload.”