WASHINGTON, DC – The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) last year provided US$7.5 billion in climate finance to Latin American and Caribbean countries as multilateral development banks (MDBs) Friday announced that their global climate finance reached a record high of US$125 billion in 2023.
The banks said that the combined total last year is more than double the amount provided in 2019, when MDBs announced their ambition to increase volumes over-time at the United Nations Secretary General’s Climate Action Summit.
In 2023, the IDB climate finance to Latin American and Caribbean countries totalledUS$7.5 billion, consisting of US$6.1 billion to the public sector, US$1.5 billion through IDB Invest’s total commitments of own-account long-term finance, and US$25 million for innovative projects from the IDB Lab.
The IDB said all member countries, including those in the Caribbean, benefitted collectively given that several small-island and low-lying coastal states in the region remain critically vulnerable to climate change regardless of income level.
“The IDB is committed to triple its climate finance in the next decade and offer a diverse set of innovative financial instruments to boost the scale of climate action in the region. The MDBs will jointly report on climate financing towards a new collective goal on climate finance”, said IDB president, Ilan Goldfajn.
According to the MDBs, last year, US$74.7 billion of MDB climate finance were for low- and middle-income economies
Of this amount US$50 billion went to climate change mitigation and $24.7 billion for climate change adaptation. The amount of mobilized private finance for this group of countries stood at US$28.5 billion.
In 2023, the banks said US$50.3 billion were allocated for high-income economies. Of this amount, US$47.3 billion were for climate change mitigation and the remaining three billion were for climate change adaptation. The amount of mobilized private finance for high-income countries stood at US$72.7 billion.
The announcement by the MDBs comes in the run-up to the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 29) to the United Nations Climate Change Conference that will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2024.
One of the key deliverables of COP29 is to increase global climate finance and reach an agreement on the new collective quantified goal of climate finance.
In April, leaders of 10 MDBs announced joint steps to work more effectively as a system and increase the impact and scale of their work. The leaders outlined key deliverables for joint and coordinated action in 2024, focusing on climate action including developing a common approach to measuring climate results and supporting countries to design country platforms, among others.
The Joint Report on Multilateral Development Banks’ Climate Finance is an annual collaboration to publish MDBs’ climate finance figures, together with a clear explanation of the methodologies for tracking this finance.
The joint report, along with the banks’ independent publication of their own individual climate finance statistics, is intended to track progress in relation to their joint climate finance objectives such as those announced at COP21 and the greater ambition pledged for the post-2020 period.
The 2023 multilateral development bank report, coordinated by the European Investment Bank (EIB), combines data from the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the EIB, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), the New Development Bank (NDB) and the World Bank Group (WBG).
