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One Planet Summit, assembly, Paris, Chabrol
Two years after the Paris Agreement, all the progressive actors—states, civil society, enterprises, financial actors, local authorities, and philanthropists—have come together in Paris for two days to share their projects and explore new ideas for accelerating the fight against climate change.

As envisioned by the President of the French Republic, this summit has also marked a new stage in mobilization for the climate, along with many concrete announcements from banks and development agencies.

The tipping point

Transforming the Paris Agreement into concrete actions requires new cooperative approaches. For the first time, more than 30 of the main development banks, including 23 members of IDFC (currently chaired by AFD) have united in ambitious cooperative action to take up the challenge of implementing the Agreement. The total amount of climate financing by these institutions reached US$185 billion at the end of 2016, an increase of +17% over 2015. 

But today, during a joint declaration, they decided to intensify this trend and to align their financial flows to the Paris Agreement by contributing to the establishment of low-carbon and resilient trajectories. They are thus incorporating the Agreement into their mission, as they have done for the reduction of poverty. This is a unique and powerful message, whose aim is a switch from fossil energies to renewable ones. According to their joint declaration, it’s a question of establishing "more explicit policies to significantly reduce reliance on fossil fuels and rapidly accelerate financing for renewables".

Adaptation: a core commitment of AFD

For its part, to help countries implement the Paris Agreement, AFD has undertaken to establish new tools, especially to accelerate adaptation measures:

  • An “Adapt’Action Facility”, endowed with €30 million over four years. It will target 15 countries especially exposed and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and provide them with technical assistance in implementing their national contributions. Its four first financing agreements, with the Republic of Mauritius, Niger, the Comoros, and Tunisia were signed today.
     
  • A “2050 Facility”, to help countries in financing the working out of their low-carbon and resilient development trajectories, which are to be established by 2020 according to the terms of the Agreement.
     
  • A Pacific initiative, in which the European Commission and other donors will also be involved, in order to finance adaptation to climate change in especially vulnerable small island states of the Pacific region.
     
  • A land degradation neutrality (LDN) fund to fight against land degradation; AFD will contribute €30 million to the fund.

In all, AFD is going to increase the volume of its annual financing for adaptation to €1.2 million in 2020. Its total annual financing for the climate is also going to grow from €4 billion in 2017 to €5 billion in 2020.

100% Paris Agreement

AFD has moreover adopted a new commitment that is going to transform its action: it will be the first “100% Paris Agreement” financial institution. As AFD CEO Rémy Rioux explains, “We have already adopted our internal procedures so that we can be sure that all the projects we finance are consistent with low-carbon and resilient long-term development.”
 

Finally, yesterday, the “Mainstreaming!” initiative, organized by IDFC and AFD, demonstrated worldwide investor involvement in the fight against global warming, in particular by presenting around 10 new members of the initiative.