Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct.17
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
One of core priorities of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in its newly released Strategy 2030 is tackling climate change, building climate and disaster resilience, and enhancing environmental sustainability, ADB told Trend.
“For the last five years we have been investing more than $4 billion in climate adaptation. These investments have been in urban, water, transport, agriculture and energy sectors. Pretty much spread around the whole Asia and Pacific region,” said the bank.
ADB said it is on track to achieve its target in 2020 to reach $6 billion of climate finance projects (in other words, projects to help fight climate change).
“We are targeting climate finance from ADB’s own resources to reach $80 billion for the period 2019 to 2030,” the bank said.
It should be noted that NGO Forum on ADB has demanded the bank to stop financing climate change.
“What we want is for the bank to divest entirely from coal and other fossil fuel financing as well as clear transition plan to sustainable and socially acceptable renewable energy projects” say’s Rayyan Hassan, executive director of NGO Forum on ADB. “ADB’s total financing for coal projects is estimated at a staggering $10.74 billion from 2009 to 2017,” he added.
The NGO Forum said the bank has not shown any sign of slowing down when it comes to coal financing particularly on the projects that are already existing like the Korea Electric Power Corp.’s 200-megawatt (MW), the coal-fired power plant in Naga, Cebu, and the Masinloc Power Partners Ltd.’s 600-MW coal-fired thermal power plant in Zambales.
“In the Philippines alone, ADB financed over $120 million in the Cebu project, while putting in $200 million in the Zambales plant,” said the NGO Forum.
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