European Investment Bank (EIB)

08.09.2021 Share

EIB President Werner Hoyer joined a group of world leaders in Rotterdam for a High-Level Dialogue on Climate Adaptation. Organised by the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA), the conference focused on raising ambition, providing more financing and increasing collaboration on climate adaptation ahead of the COP26 conference in Glasgow this November.

Climate adaptation means taking action to prepare for, and adjust to, both the current effects of climate change and the predicted impacts in the future. These include increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events, as witnessed through the recent drought and fires in Southern Europe, Russia and North America and severe flooding in Western Europe, Africa and Asia.

At the event, President Hoyer; Patrick V. Verkooijen, Chief Executive of the Global Center on Adaptation; and Ban Ki-moon, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations and Co-Chair of the GCA; announced that the EIB and the GCA will collaborate to share knowledge, tools and capacity-building while working together to scale up financing for adaptation. The collaboration aims to accelerate adaptation action in the most climate vulnerable regions of the world.

The collaboration will bring together the complementary strengths of the two organisations, with the EIB as one of the world’s largest multilateral financiers of climate action and the GCA as a solutions broker for adaptation.

The Rotterdam meeting gathered leaders from many countries, as well as representatives of regional and international organisations. The participants including, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organizations, issued a call to action for governments, policy-makers and the public on what COP26 must deliver if communities are to be kept safe from the accelerating climate impacts in the coming decade.

President Hoyer addressed the conference to reflect on the importance of partnerships for effective climate change adaptation. He presented the EIB’s ambition on climate change adaptation under the bank’s Climate Bank Roadmap. Read the speech here.