European Investment Bank (EIB) has expressed its readiness to collaborate with African governments on accelerating climate adaptation in the continent.
The EIB President, Werner Hoyer, made the promise at the Africa Adaptation Summit, the first-ever global summit to focus solely on accelerating climate adaptation in Africa organized by the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA), in Rotterdam, Netherlands and which featured leaders from government, the United Nations, and business community.
President Hoyer, who opened the leader’s roundtable of the conference to present the investment challenges to increase adaptation finance in Africa and outlined how the EIB can support adaptation projects, restated the EIB’s plan to triple its global climate adaptation finance by 2025
He said: “Climate Change could wipe out 15% of Africa’s gross domestic product by 2030, which would mean an additional 100 million people in extreme poverty by the end of the decade. A scenario that is particularly unfair towards a continent that has contributed only marginally to climate change.
“The EIB has been a strong partner of African countries for more than 55 years. Through our new development arm EIB Global we are strengthening our presence in Africa and are mobilising private capital at scale for innovative green technologies, such as green hydrogen.
“We will use this experience to build new partnerships to unlock private finance for adaptation projects, including under the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program”, the investment banker added.
It would be recalled that in September last year, the EIB and GCA agreed to mobilise action in regions of the world that are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as the African continent, where the EIB and GCA collaborate on the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP), an initiative developed by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and GCA to scale up adaptation action in Africa by mobilising $25 billion.
Currently, the EIB and GCA are working closely with the AfDB and other multilateral development banks, as well as international financial institutions, with the goal of providing financing for projects that fall under the AAAP’s pillars.
These include. infrastructure resilience, youth empowerment through jobs and entrepreneurship and climate-smart digital technologies for agriculture and food security.
Over the last five years, the EIB has provided €18 billion for public and private investment across Africa. This includes working with African and international partners to strengthen drinking water and wastewater treatment in cities throughout the African continent.
Some of the beneficiary cities include Bamako, Cairo, Dakar, Kigali, Niamey, Ouagadougou and Tunis, thereby enabling smallholder farmers to adapt agriculture to a changing climate and strengthen measures to reduce land degradation.
The EIB Climate Adaptation Plan supports the objectives of the EU Adaptation Strategy inside and outside the European Union.
