Last Monday was an exciting time for BwB as Managing Director Asen Charliyski (Global Head for Sustainable City Finance) and Analysts Matteo Scalabrino and Ben Hikmet participated in the kick-off event of the Climate-neutral & Smart Cities Mission Net Zero Cities EU in Brussels.
Asen Charliyski shared that, "The role of finance is crucial in helping cities achieve climateneutrality and we, at BwB, are exited at the opportunity to work with more than 100 cities to help them source capital at scale. We have experience of working with both the public and private sector in developing financial instruments, such as green bonds, green mortgages, green equity and others alike. We work with finance ministries, with European multilateral banks and development banks, infrastructure funds, private equity and start-up funds to incentivise channelling of capital towards climate & nature."
Bankers without Boundaries had the
pleasure to interact with more than 100 Mission Cities and discuss the Investment Plan to attract green capital and investments. The investment requirement to achieve Climate Neutrality at the city level is significant and the funding gap in urban climate finance is estimated at trillions of dollars. Public resources will be insufficient to address this gap and innovative financial instruments need to be developed to attract private investment capital. It is estimated that $93 trillion will be needed globally for sustainable infrastructure investments. Within this, early-stage project preparation finance is a particular barrier. Of the total investment required for sustainable infrastructure investments, up to $4.5 trillion will be required for the project preparation stage. Together with our partners, we are going to do our best to develop such mechanisms that combine various sources of capital to achieve sustainable returns whilst delivering social and environment impact.