African Development Bank

Metric	Summary
Promotion of green finance	Paris aligned – The Bank is active in green finance and engages often with central banks, especially in knowledge sharing and capacity building.
Fossil to non-fossil energy finance ratio and scaling up climate finance	Some progress – For every $1 the AfDB provides to fossil fuels, $2.5 goes to renewables & $3.6 goes to T&D between 2016-2019.
Nature based solutions	Some progress – Some biodiversity commitments and limited exclusion around logging. Intention to scale up nature based solutions, but concrete strategies needed.
Climate risk, resilience, and adaptation	Paris aligned – Substantial evidence of project based and systemic adaptation and climate risk assessments.
Overarching climate strategy	Some progress – The Climate Change Action Plan 2 is close to being aligned with the Paris Agreement. The overarching strategy could be more explicit on climate change. The High Five Agenda are well integrated into the CCAP2, but have little commitments on climate on their own.
Integration of climate mitigation and resilience in key sectoral strategies	Unaligned – Very limited integration of climate in some sectoral strategies, and no mention of climate in transport or water strategy.
Institutional leadership	Paris aligned – Leadership in specific areas such as energy access and resilience.
Energy access and fuel poverty	Paris aligned – In line with the High 5 Agenda, AfDB has an ambitious Bank-specific target and monitors progress relatively well, but is behind target on access to clean cooking energy and could improve data availability.
Energy efficiency strategy, standards and investment	Unaligned – Few energy efficiency standards in key sectors.
Fossil fuel exclusion policies	Some progress – Only some upstream oil and gas exploration activities excluded.
Greenhouse gas accounting and reduction	Some progress – GHG accounting at project level but no reporting at portfolio-level and no target for peaking or reducing GHGs set.
Shadow carbon pricing	Unaligned – No shadow carbon price.
Country level work	Some progress – The Bank’s country approach is mindful of climate change, including mitigation and adaptation, but does not appear to account specifically for NDC ambitions.
Technical assistance for implementing Paris goals	Paris aligned – Technical assistance to support NDCs, fossil fuel subsidy reform and green growth.
Transparency of climate finance data	Some progress – Transparency of financial intermediary lending needs improving.

Recommendations

• AfDB should commit to a specific target date for Paris alignment. The Bank should also consider a deeper integration of climate in its sectoral strategies and strongly linking these to its good overarching strategy framework.  
• The AfDB should expand its fossil exclusion policy. Even coal has not been excluded so far. This requires an update to reflect AfDB’s climate ambitions. 
• Improve work on nature-based solutions. The AfDB needs to integrate nature-based lending across sectors where appropriate. The Bank’s Climate Change Action Plan should include an explicit commitment to (net-) zero deforestation across the portfolio, as well as policy support for country forest goals.  
• The AfDB should significantly improve its energy efficiency standards, as this will be an important issue for Africa moving forwards. The Bank has established few energy efficiency standards in relevant sectors such as buildings and should improve this. 
• The AfDB should expand its greenhouse gas accounting. The AfDB should explicitly provide information on the GHG accounting reporting at project level for the sectors covered by the GHG emission accounting tool. 

Leadership area

AfDB is a leader in the area of climate risk screening. AfDB is the only MDB to have a target to reach parity of adaptation and mitigation finance flows by 2020. In fact, the Bank exceeded its target of achieving parity between adaptation and mitigation finance by allocating 55% of its climate finance resources to adaptation and 45% to mitigation.  AfDB has also developed an innovative mechanism known as the Adaptation Benefit Mechanism (ABM) with the aim to support adaptation through a transparent and efficient results-based mechanism. The mechanism is currently being piloted and E3G will continue to monitor its implementation.