By David Lawder
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development are calling on leaders of multilateral development banks for an urgent meeting on extreme heat and its devastating impact on developing countries, Treasury officials said.
The private, virtual meeting on Thursday morning – the first of its kind – aims to find ways to shift more resources to help countries build climate resilience and adaptation to reduce extreme heat damage amid a summer of record temperatures worldwide, Treasury officials told Reuters. .
While investments to combat climate change have increased dramatically in recent years, much of that growth has gone towards transitioning to clean energy sources and reducing carbon emissions, rather than helping countries adapt to the damaging consequences, including more severe droughts, forest fires and violent storms. and rising ocean levels.
As heat waves grip the world and claim at least hundreds of lives, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will use the meeting to link the urgent needs of developing countries hardest hit by high temperatures to the broader work being done by multilateral development banks to increase their lending capacity. to help combat climate change and other global crises.
“Extreme weather events, including heat waves, are becoming more severe and frequent from the East Coast of the United States to India,” Yellen said in a statement to the banks seen by Reuters. “Mitigating and responding to these events, and addressing climate change generally, is a top priority for the Treasury Department.”
Yellen will tell the World Bank and its sister institutions to link temperature increases to their assessments of developing countries’ climate resilience and adaptation.
USAID Administrator Samantha Power, who launched a summit and “action center” in March to draw international donor attention to the issue, said that of the 400 projects funded by the Climate Investment Funds, only seven were directly affected by extreme heat .
“The multilateral development banks are our only hope to secure sufficient financing to directly address the scale of the extreme heat crisis,” she said, adding that rising temperatures are likely to kill tens of thousands of people every year and are estimated to damage the global economy will cause harm. $2.4 trillion by 2030.
USAID is investing more than $8 million in heat-resistant schools in Jordan, as extreme temperatures undermine education and close classrooms.
Senior Managing Director of the World Bank Axel van Trotsenburg will participate on behalf of World Bank President Ajay Banga, while Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) President Ilan Goldfajn and Asian Development Bank President Masatsugu Asakawa will be in attendance. Heads of the African Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Japan International Cooperation Agency will also participate, finance ministry officials said.
An IDB source said Goldfajn will emphasize that heat mitigation is a key part of the bank’s climate strategy. The bank provided $100 million in technical assistance in 2023 on climate issues and extreme heat, including helping Chile develop strategies to keep cities cooler through the use of green roofs, green space corridors and reflective infrastructure surfaces.
Goldfajn will also discuss the bank’s work to help development banks work in a more coordinated way to achieve greater scale and impact in the fight against climate change. That included developing innovative financing instruments, such as using International Monetary Fund reserves to support hybrid capital, the source said.
