Asian Development Bank

Integration of climate change into country level work

This page is part of the E3G Public Bank Climate Tracker Matrix, our tool to help you assess the Paris alignment of public banks, MDBs and DFIs.

Share
Paris alignmentReasoning
Some progressCountry Partnership Strategies include both adaptation and mitigation, as well as integration of NDC goals, but don’t raise ambition in line with 1.5°C or 2°C target.

Explanation

ADB’s work with countries is referred to as Country Partnership Strategies. The ADB’s Country Partnership Strategy guidance was comprehensively revised in 2009, streamlining previous country work into a succinct structure including the “selected focus”, supplemented with defining characteristics of the programme, summary of domestic drivers and a results framework. Notably, this guidance includes climate change as one of five core areas (combined with environment).  Since then, a “mid term review” was undertaken in 2015. In this update, “environment and climate change” is noted for consideration in each outline, alongside related disaster risks and is recognised as a “key impediment” to inclusive and sustainable growth.  The document does not mention the Paris Agreement or its goals, and we recommend that the Country Partnership Strategy procedure is redesigned to incorporate these.

ADB’s new Climate Change Operational Framework (2017) cites the need to “embed NDCs and climate considerations in all country partnership strategies and country operations business plans”.  It also states that ADB “will ensure that successive generations of Country Partnership Strategies are supportive of a long-term transition toward low GHG emissions and climate-resilient development paths” and that “robust diagnostics, including climate models and analyses of climate risk, and adaptation and mitigation needs and opportunities, must underpin the Country Partnership Strategies”. It also states that ADB will continue to support countries in “gaining a better understanding of the economics of climate impact”. For example, India’s Country Partnership Strategy 2018-22 includes several references to achievement of NDC goals. Despite this, the Bank does not necessarily show proactivity in regards to helping member nations increase their NDC ambitions.

The current guidance may be more weighted to adaptation than mitigation. In 2017, ADB issued guidance on the integration of Disaster Risk Management into CPSs, which included analysis on the likely consequences of climate change and climate-related hazards, stating that the Disaster Risk Management assessment “should consider the impacts of climate change on natural hazards both over the typical expected life of infrastructure and also over more extended periods of 50–100 years”.

More information is available on the Country Partnership Strategies for Indonesia, Vietnam and Philippines in E3G’s report “The ADB: Asia’s future climate bank?“.

Recommendation: The ADB should update its Country Partnership Strategy guidelines to incorporate its newest climate change strategy and should focus on raising NDCs to 1.5°C compatibility.


 

Last Update: November 2020

Subscribe to our newsletter