President Hoyer met with United Nations (UN) partners in New York last week. He underlined that the European Investment Bank (EIB) will do its part to increase the effectiveness and the volumes of financing devoted to delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and tackling the climate emergency.
The visit comes ahead of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in mid-September, where the UN will call for more urgent global action and push for an SDG stimulus package, accompanied by a climate acceleration agenda.
President Hoyer met with Secretary General António Guterres to reiterate the EIB’s commitment to “eye to eye” partnership with the UN family and to delivering the SDGs, which he described as “the compass that guides everything we do.”
Their wide-ranging discussion extended to issues from the challenge of reforming international financial architecture, to what the EIB and its new development arm, EIB Global, are doing to support the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, to the Bank’s strong engagement with the World Health Organization in the Global South.
As part of the UNGA starting on 18 September, the Secretary General is convening two special summits and a series of high-level meetings that will be attended by an EIB delegation, led by President Hoyer and Vice-President Ambroise Fayolle. The 2023 SDG Summit is intended to form the centrepiece of the UNGA.
Last week also saw a number of other key bilaterals, including with Ambassador Paula Narváez, the new President of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). ECOSOC is one of the six principal organs of the UN, and oversees and co-ordinates the work of many of the EIB’s key UN counterparts. Ambassador Narváez’s meeting with President Hoyer was one of her first meetings with external stakeholders since her nomination. He assured her of the Bank’s support for her presidency, laying out the EIB’s leading role in areas such as climate and SDG financing, as well as creating and implementing innovative blending and de-risking instruments to mobilise private investors.
