ADB Annual Meeting – Day 1

• ADB’s 56th Annual Meeting opens with focus on climate change and climate finance?
• ADB opens new era in climate finance with launch of the Innovative Finance Facility for Climate in Asia and the Pacific (IFCAP)?
• Climate Envoy Warren Evans breaks down the climate challenges and opportunities facing the region?

Climate change is the defining challenge of our time. As ADB President Masatsugu Asakawa said in his opening press conference at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank, the battle against climate change is a fight for our very existence. ?

This battle will be won or lost in Asia and the Pacific, which accounts for more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions. Massive investment is needed to reduce these emissions and scale up resilience to climate change impacts. Multilateral development banks have a critical role to play.?

ADB has taken bold steps, including raising its ambition to deliver $100 billion in climate finance to developing member countries between 2019 and 2030. Today it announced the Innovative Finance Facility for Climate in Asia and the Pacific (IF-CAP), a global first and a one-stop shop for climate finance for the region that could amplify ADB’s climate finance capacity by five-fold.

In a new episode of ADB Insight, Warren Evans, ADB’s climate Envoy, says: “IF-CAP is a very new way of mobilizing climate finance. It's using guarantees from donor governments and will potentially carve out a part of our existing sovereign portfolio, take them off our books, and that frees up capital for us to be able to invest in new climate investment, climate projects.”?

As delegates convene at the ADB Annual Meeting, the climate conversation is intensifying. Developing and implementing the policies to deliver a transition to net zero will be key. A post on the Asian Development Blog outlines how carbon pricing reform can help countries to embark on a low-carbon growth path.?

The ASEAN+3 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting highlighted the need for climate-smart infrastructure. The massive cost of this and other adaptation measures can only be met with help from the private sector. President Asakawa in his address highlights ADB's increasingly significant role in mobilizing private capital for climate finance.?

Finally, winning the battle against climate change demands innovative thinking, which ADB and the Republic of Korea are providing through partnerships and initiatives targeting early direct investments in climate tech startups and by investments in small and medium-sized enterprises in frontier markets.?