Statement delivered by Mr. Thomas Östros, Vice President European Investment Bank
V20 MINISTERIAL DIALOGUE IX
16 October 2022
Mr. Thomas Östros, Vice President European Investment Bank
Thank you, Chair, your Excellencies, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to listen to you today and to give a short address also.
I really would like to mention that we are cooperating intimately with many of you already today and we are interested to deepen that cooperation. And also, we as a collective body of the V20 is also interesting for us to go deeper into cooperation.
Despite the strong humanitarian and economic case for accelerating investment in adaption and resilience, we have to start acknowledging, and it has been acknowledged here today, that investments remain low, and rolling out solutions and projects at scale are lagging behind all around the world.
And the ultimate target of accelerating climate action is to be achieved by promoting long-term, sustainable solutions, optimizing local economies, improving socioeconomic and growth outcomes.
On the proposal for a mechanism focused on funding of infrastructure for resilience for climate change projects, we recognize that the mitigation of financial risk is one effective vehicle for supporting capital intensive investments in regions with high cost of capital. We are already focused as a bank, as the Bank of the European Union, on our efforts in this direction.
As a climate Bank, our target is to finance 50 percent of our total financing directly related to climate and environmental sustainable investments. And at COP26 we launched EIB’s first dedicated Climate Adaption Plan.
The Plan has three goals. To increase our financing for adaption significantly, to reach 50 percent of our climate action by 2025. Our aim is to invest more and with more impact in priorities such as flood management, protecting energy and transport infrastructure, and in innovation by ramping up support for public and, crucially, private sector action.
We will support smarter and more systematic adaption, promoting the use of robust climate information in the operation that we finance. This means the EIB will strengthen our upstream engagement with you and with other partners and provide targeted advisory services to clients.
And we will try to accelerate global action on adaption to increase the impact of our operations worldwide. At EIB we have established a specialized development financing arm, EIB Global. EIB’s development work aims at responding to the growing demand for strategic cooperation between the world and Europe.
As EIB operates globally, we are ready to share our expertise for leveraging financial instruments to enable a shift towards resilient and renewable investments that accelerate adaptation in least developed countries and small island developing states.
Thank you for this opportunity to address you. Thank you.
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