President Werner Hoyer – Keynote remarks at the Africa Adaptation Summit

Your excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,

It is a great honour for me to join you here today for this Leader’s Roundtable. I am delighted to see so many of our partners and friends together in one place and in such a great spirit of collaboration. This is key if we are going to address the adaptation issues at hand.

Now is not the time to neglect challenges. As we are experiencing a sharp rise in energy and food prices, the impact of climate change just make things worse.

So…it is not the time for financial institutions to neglect or dodge responsibilities. To that end, the EIB has come forward with a promise of significant focus for support to adaptation, including of course in Africa, as part of the European Union’s commitment for a strong partnership between the two continents.

As the EU’s Climate and Development Bank we must have adaptation in mind in everything we do.

This is why the EIB is now implementing the Adaptation Plan that we announced in Glasgow last year, through which we are promoting faster and more systemic adaptation worldwide – in line with the new EU Adaptation Strategy.

We know that pervasive market failures are holding back investment in adaptation. This is why, at the EIB we’ve committed to a three-fold increase in adaptation finance over the next few years.

To scale up adaptation finance, particularly in Africa, we are ready to take on more risk. Typically, we finance up to 50% of a project. We have decided to increase this to 75% for projects that are primarily motivated by adaptation – and up to 100% for projects in the most vulnerable parts of the world, including Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries. In fact, we’ve just done so for water supply infrastructure in Sao Tome.

Climate, innovation, and development, are inseparable parts of the same approach. This is why it’s important to foster our partnership around smarter and more systemic adaptation:

…for instance, by closing the climate data gap. For this purpose, the EIB and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which hosts the remarkable Copernicus Programme, have created a powerful partnership. This will make high-resolution climate data available to our clients all over the world including in Africa.

We also want to promote adaptation at a more systemic level, looking beyond single projects. We are therefore starting our upstream engagement activities with individual countries to translate National Adaptation Plans and Strategies into a pipeline of projects that we can finance.

Earlier this year we launched EIB Global – a new specialised branch of the EIB dedicated to development finance. This will increase the EU’s value proposition in adaptation investment:  more people and expertise on the ground, more tailored financial solutions and a strong Team Europe approach.

In Africa we stand shoulder to shoulder with the AAAP and we are exploring ways of potentially making our Advisory Platform in Europe “ADAPT” available to clients in Africa and globally as well.

Your excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,

You can count on the EIB Group. We greatly appreciate the work of our partners at the GCA to better understand and alleviate the barriers to adaptation finance and I hope the Summit today will help prepare the way for increasing not just the volume of adaptation finance, but also the right kind of financing with the right level of impact.

Thank you very much.