EBRD mobilized €10 bn climate funds from private sources in 2022

25 / 04 / 2023

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The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) mobilized €10 billion in 2022 in direct and indirect climate funds from private sources, EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso said in her speech at the 2023 London City Week.

“Over the last two decades, we have committed more than €50 billion in green projects,” she said, adding that “last year alone, we provided over €6 billion in green finance.”

“In many of our countries, we are the single largest investor when it comes to climate investments,” she said.

“But we pay just as much attention to how much money, especially private money, we mobilize from others alongside us,” she said.

The EBRD regions host approximately 11 percent of global coal reserves and exhibit a strong dependency on high-carbon assets, such as refineries and steelmaking plants.

“At the same time, our regions are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” she said.

In recent times, heatwaves in Central Asia have reached temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius, severe flooding across the Balkans caused millions of Euros of damage, and droughts required water rationing in North Africa.

The economies where EBRD works show some of the common barriers to climate investments: weak regulatory environments, an absence of carbon pricing, persistent fossil fuel subsidies, a lack of climate data, and limited technical and administrative capacity.

Many of the 36 economies where EBRD currently operates are amongst the most carbon intensive in the world.

“If we want to hold to temperature goals set by the Paris Agreement, mitigation finance flows to developing countries must increase by 4 to 7 times. Adaptation finance must increase by 5 to 10 times,” she stressed.

Across low- and middle-income countries, excluding China, that is an investment need of well over 2 trillion dollars every year by 2030, she expounded.

Public funds, whether from multilateral development banks or governments, will not be sufficient to cover the trillions required to transition to a resilient, low-carbon world.

The bulk of the capital needs to come from the private sector.

“But we see that first and foremost as an opportunity for emerging markets and for the private sector. The energy crisis the world has experienced since last year has of course a disproportionate social and economic impact of the poor and the most fragile. But it also offers a unique opportunity to accelerate the transition towards greener solutions and technologies, and to a lesser dependence on fossil fuels – a large part of them coming from unfriendly and volatile jurisdictions,” she highlighted.