BUSINESS REPORTER
The African Development Bank (AfDB) has appointed a Zimbabwean expert to the board of a continental initiative to mobilise financing for resilience to the negative impacts of climate change.
The Zimbabwean expert, Doreen Mnyulwa, is the Regional Agriculture and Environmental Innovation Network for Africa.
She will sit on the Adaptation Benefits Mechanism (ABM) board alongside Evelyne Batamuliza, a climate change finance and gender expert from Rwanda; Louise Helen Brown, a Namibian who formerly worked for the African Development Bank; and others.
The interim ABM was established last month and is being assisted by an interim secretariat placed in the bank’s Climate Change and Green Growth department, headed by the director, 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.
The ABM aims to mobilise public and private sector finance for enhanced climate change resilience and adaptation by creating a new asset – certified adaptation benefits. The mechanism will assist developing countries with meeting climate change needs and priorities for adaptation set out in their Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, in particular those requiring international cooperation.
During the pilot phase, AfDB and partners will seek funding from various sources to realise multiple smallscale resilience projects to test the mechanism on the ground.
The demonstration projects will be used to develop methodologies for delivery of adaptation benefits, verify the outcomes and prove the effectiveness of ABM for mobilising new adaptation finance for replication.
