Civic groups urge ADB: End support for fossil fuel projects

Days before the Asian Development Bank's Annual Governors Meeting, civil society groups challenged the multilateral lender to rethink its fossil fuel energy policies by “decarbonizing” its energy investments portfolio.

"The critical reflections we from civil society offer today mirror what the bank's Independent Evaluation Department reported: that ADB needs a new energy policy that accurately responds to the region's needs. In doing so it must live up to its role in global energy transformation, which it can begin by completely leaving coal in its dirty past," said Gerry Arances, executive director of the Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development (CEED).

Arances said that with the worsening climate crisis, deteriorating air quality, increasing viability of renewable energy, and environmental and economic imperatives on the need for a green recovery, the imperative to decarbonize is being highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through the "lenient energy policy it adopted in 2009, the ADB is guilty of having shaped Asia's energy sector into its carbon-intensive state today,” Arances said.

“No amount of renewable energy investments could cover up the bank's role in advancing the myth of clean coal and the fact that half of the total installed capacity of power generation projects it funded the past decade are from fossil fuels,” he said.

Likewise, Rayyan Hassan, executive director of NGO Forum on ADB, said the Taal volcano eruption, Australian forest fires, floods in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the typhoons in the US all struck within a span of seven months amid COVID-19.

“If there ever was a time to be climate responsible for ADB, it is now," Hassan said.

The ADB’s 53rd annual meeting of the  Board of Governors will run virtually from September 17 to 18, 2020.

Forum representatives Vidya Dinker of Growth Watch in India, Hasan Mehedi of Coastal Livelihood and Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) in Bangladesh, and Richard Kahulugan of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice also expressed a unified call for an end to ADB's support for “dirty” energy in their countries.

"The ADB IED Evaluation on ADB's Energy Policy recommends ending coal power for Asia-Pacific. We as NGO Forum on ADB demand that the ADB Board of Directors and ADB Senior Management take heed of this recommendation and act swiftly towards an immediate end on all coal and coal-related power and forge towards a just transition to limit global temperature rise to the Paris goal of 1.5°C. ADB must end coal, and end it now. We are out of time," Hassan said. —LBG, GMA News