91 line with the Bank’s Private Sector Development Strategy (SNSP, 2013), the Bank will transform climate change and green growth into opportunities for the private sector, and elevate private sector participation in climate change and green growth investments. Robust and resilient recovery The African Development Bank’s Climate Change and Green Growth Strategy emerges amid the socioeconomic shock induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The repercussions of this public health crisis have reinforced the need for a multidimensional and integrated response to paradigm-shifting shocks and stressors of this nature. Such shocks and stressors will increasingly include and interact with climate change-driven natural disasters and environmental hazards. If Africa does not adequately learn from the lessons of the pandemic and mass disasters in recent years (e.g. cyclone-related devastation, large-scale floods, multi-year droughts), it will struggle each time a destabilizing event or agent emerges—whether that be a public health emergency, an economic downturn, or environmental collapse. The African Development Bank must harness these lessons and use them to inform proactive, integrated approaches to climate change risk management. Shocks and stressors also offer an opportunity for reinvention, just as the pandemic has presented a chance to ‘build back better’ and promote resilience and sustainability in national economies. The African Development Bank must capitalize on such an opportunity to re-envision and redesign economic and financial systems across Africa, including infrastructure, to elevate self-sufficiency as well as collective resilience by African countries. The Bank’s investments in the post-COVID era must enable a robust as well as a green and resilient recovery, since broad-based resilience in societies and communities will serve to strengthen adaptive capacity to climate change. There will be further emphasis on resilience-strengthening efforts that contribute to building transformative capacities, as opposed to merely capacity for recovery and reconstruction. Convening power, partnerships, and activation of key actors Climate change and green growth are economy-wide systemic challenges and imperatives (respectively). Addressing them requires a cross-sectoral, broadbased approach that can influence the action and behaviour of a wide spectrum of societal actors, and can shift multifaceted economic systems. The scale and complexity of climate change and green growth are such that the Bank cannot tackle these effectively on its own. The reality of limited resources and tools at the disposal of the Bank also calls for selectivity in its climate change and green growth priorities. It will thus focus its efforts in areas where it has a comparative advantage, and can contribute to a more expansive agenda through strategic partnerships, platforms, and coalitions. This includes partnerships with the private sector; other MDBs; international non-governmental organizations; knowledge institutions, knowledge hubs, researchers, universities, and academia generally; civil society organizations; and thirdsector institutions in African countries. For example, the Bank has worked with other MDBs to develop consistent climate finance tracking methodologies and a pathway towards alignment with the Paris Agreement— critical areas that can be strengthened and expanded upon with future collaborations. The Bank has already invested in developing such partnerships in the realm of climate change and green growth. These include the Africa Nationally Determined Contributions Hub, which (as of 2021) increased its membership to 19 institutions; the AFAC; NEPAD; the Nairobi Framework Partnership; the Africa Circular Economy Alliance and MultiDonor Trust Fund; the CDSF; and the recently launched the AAAP under the GCA’s Regional Africa Office hosted by the Bank. Moving forward, the emphasis of the Bank’s strategy will be less on creating a multiplicity of new high-profile platforms and institutional entities, and more on leveraging existing partnerships and knowledge networks, i.e., deriving substantial results from partnerships already in place. The focus of partnerships on climate change and green growth will be to capture all that has been accomplished thus far, cement it, and build on this. Such is the rich body of work produced by the Africa Adaptation Initiative. This will avoid launching new alliances that ‘reinvent the wheel.’ The number of key partnerships is less critical than the production of concrete outputs that have a measurable impact, so that Bank-led initiatives can be differentiated from the crowded landscape of other climate change and green growth platforms and partnerships. Recommendations on deploying the Bank’s convening Green growth in Africa — current initiatives and future developments
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