President of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) Jin Liqun said on Tuesday that India should find a balance between building physical infrastructure and social infrastructure like healthcare systems. The AIIB president added that the international lender would strive to invest in both social and climate-resilient projects in India in the next few years, stressing that the country had a “great need” to boost its healthcare infrastructure.
Mr Jin said at a press conference ahead of the governors’ board meeting that the AIIB will align its operations with the Paris Agreement’s goals for dealing with climate change by July 2023, and that the bank expects to finance $50 billion in climate change mitigation and adaptation infrastructure projects by 2030. Mr Jin stated that India needs to construct modern infrastructure and that when the Bank screened bids, it collaborated with the government to guarantee that infrastructure projects that address climate change were given priority.
The Beijing-based financial firm said that it is collaborating with the Indian government on climate-resilient infrastructure projects. He noted that the AIIB had funded a project in India to deal with the pandemic and praised the Indian government’s efforts to curb the COVID-19 outbreak. Given the country’s population, the AIIB believes that India’s healthcare system is in desperate need of improvement.
AIIB will align its operations with the Paris Agreement targets by July 1, 2023, according to Liqun.By 2030, the bank expects to have approved USD 50 billion worth of climate finance. Since the AIIB began publicly releasing the number in 2019, this sum represents a fourfold increase in yearly climate finance commitments.
The AIIB is presently putting a stringent framework in place to guarantee that projects fulfil the Paris Agreement’s low-carbon and climate-resilient standards. The strategy is based on international norms and frameworks that are currently being created with the help of other multilateral development banks.
