Civil society organisations working to protect the environment in Africa have just sent an open letter to the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB). In this correspondence, the AfDB is asked to completely stop funding for polluting energies. The African Development Bank (AfDB) must put in place a directive excluding the financing of fossil fuels, and publish it without delay on its website. This is the subject of an open letter from environmental civil society organisations to AfDB President Akinwunmi Adesina. The latter is called upon to sign a note from which his financial institution will no longer finance and provide financial and technical support to coal, gas and oil projects on the African continent.
As the continent’s main financial institution, the AfDB has already in the past adopted an approach to promote renewable energy, whose share of the portfolio in power generation increased from 14% between 2007 and 2011 to 70% between 2012 and 2017. However, given the climate emergency, reinforced by the barrier measures following the Covid-19 pandemic and the short time frame to reach the zero net emissions target, the Bank is called upon to make more efforts by formally and definitively disengaging itself from any current or future fossil fuel projects, and to move into the era of 100% renewable energy and sustainable development.
This call comes as a prelude to the “Finance in Common Summit”, which the AfDB will attend from 9 to 12 November 2020 in France. Organized by the French Development Agency (AFD), this summit will bring together for the first time all 450 public development banks of the planet to search for sustainable and solidarity-based investment solutions and methodologies to verify this. It will also aim to measure the impacts of the actions of these banks in the implementation of sustainable development objectives (SDOs).