On 2 November 2021, at the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, the European Investment Bank joined fellow multilateral development banks (MDB) by signing a joint statement undertaking to do more work to protect nature and stop biodiversity loss.
EIB President Werner Hoyer signed the statement that commits the bank to supporting clients, to implement decisions made at United Nations climate and biodiversity conferences. The goal is to stop the degradation of our natural environment, make investments that have positive effects on the climate and nature, and use nature valuation to guide decision-making, reporting, and monitoring.
The MDB statement on nature, people and planet was endorsed by the G7 and will complement the Leader’s Pledge for Nature supported by different countries and the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge that is backed by the private financial and corporate sectors. The EIB has been closely associated with this work.
Signing up to this initiative reinforces the EIB’s commitments on nature and biodiversity. Protecting nature is a key principle of our sustainable financing. The EIB is committed to environmental sustainability in all its work. The policies and operations defined in our Environmental and Social Standards apply wherever we operate. We continue to work closely with clients to avoid and minimise risks and impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems in every project we support.
Today, the EIB is one of the key players in financing nature-positive investments and supporting nature-based solutions for climate adaptation and resilience. We offer many different financing instruments bringing together the public and private sectors and reducing the risk of such investments.
By working with more public and private partners, as well as other financial institutions, we are mobilising more funds for sectors like sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry and the ocean economy in Africa, Latin America and Asia, where some of the biggest biodiversity losses are occurring.
One key example is our investment in the Land Degradation Neutrality Fund, a first-of-its-kind impact investment fund supporting for-profit sustainable land use and ecosystem restoration projects in developing countries.
We also know oceans play a vital role in the world economy and they are also the largest carbon sink on the planet, helping to regulate the global climate. However, oceans are under enormous pressure, with economic and social implications for billions of people.
This is one key area where the climate and nature agendas need to converge. In 2018, the EIB joined forces with the German and French development banks KfW and AFD to launch the Clean Ocean Initiative. By 2023, the initiative will have financed €2 billion for the management of waste, wastewater and stormwater in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We have already achieved two-thirds of this goal.
We aim not just to make nature a part of all our policies and activities, but also to increase our financing for nature investments as a key way to fight the dual climate and biodiversity emergencies.
