AfDB creates a board to enhance financing for resilience to climate change’s effects

A group of experts has been appointed by the African Development Bank to the board of a continental initiative in order to mobilize financing for resilience to the negative impacts of climate change.

The African Development Bank has recently established the interim executive board of the Adaptation Benefits Mechanism. The Adaptation Benefits Mechanism is being assisted by an interim secretariat, which is placed in the Bank's Climate Change and Green Growth department, headed by the director Dr. Anthony Nyong.

"We have on board some of the brightest minds in the climate change world, with tons of experience in different areas and with different stakeholder groups for ABM. They have the noble and pioneering task of convincing the world that adaptation action, just like mitigation action, has value and should be rewarded," Nyong said.

"I am proud of the excellent composition of the Adaptation Benefits Mechanism board, its regional distribution and full gender equality," Nyong cited.

The board members are: Evelyne Batamuliza, a climate change finance and gender expert from Rwanda; Louise Helen Brown, a Namibian who formerly worked for the African Development Bank; Luc Gnacadja, who served as Benin's Minister of the Environment, Housing, and Urban Planning from June 1999 to February 2005 and former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification; Swiss climate policy expert Dr. Axel Michaelowa; Senegal's Daouda Ben Oumar Ndiaye, lead climate adaptation specialist at the Islamic Development Bank; Doreen Mnyulwa from Zimbabwe, director of the Regional Agriculture and Environmental Innovation Network for Africa; Fatima-Zahra Taibi from Morocco, senior advisor at the United Nations Environment /Technical University of Denmark (DTU) Partnership; and Assefa Tofu, director of the Ethiopia Dry Lands Development Program of World Vision Ethiopia.

The Adaptation Benefits Mechanism intends to mobilize public and private sector finance for enhanced climate change resilience and adaptation by creating a new asset – certified adaptation benefits. The mechanism will help developing nations with meeting climate change requirements and priorities for set out in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, in particular those requiring international cooperation.

The concept of the Adaptation Benefits Mechanism was developed by the African Development Bank with the support of the Climate Investment Funds, in collaboration with the governments of Uganda and Cote d'Ivoire and various stakeholders. The ABM is potentially applicable in all countries.