Since October 2016, the bank has published two drafts of its energy strategy and held two month-long public consultations. It’s worth considering the type and scale of the problems the AIIB is trying to address. The bank’s first draft of the strategy stressed that two billion people in Asia still rely on solid fuels such as biomass and that 460 million lack access to electricity.
For these reasons, the development bank’s commitment to “green” is tempered by the pressing need to improve energy access and security.
This would also explain the rather ambiguous phrase “modern energy” that appears in both drafts to describe the type of energy that will be used to achieve the strategy’s goals. Civil society observers have pointed out that “modern energy” does not necessarily mean clean and renewable energy.
The bank’s investments so far would seem to bear this out. Of the nine projects approved, four are in the energy sector. Despite repeated references to climate change and support for the Paris Agreement in the strategy’s guiding principles, the four approved projects to date have ignored renewables such as wind and solar.
Instead, investments have focused on bringing energy and electricity to rural areas, upgrading fossil fuel electricity generation, and the “responsible” construction of hydropower capacity.
Calvin Quek, head of Greenpeace East Asia's Sustainable Finance Programme, said that of the four energy projects approved by the bank so far, the majority are unrelated to renewable energy, which fails to clearly reflect the bank’s cited concern over climate change.
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