Page 28 - Demo Faces

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“All innovative climate change technologies need money and access to markets and people. We’re a development bank, we have all of those. We’ve just got to nd ways to deploy them well.”
Steve Peters
Senior Energy Specialist for Waste-to- Energy, Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department; and ADB Very Innovative Person
Getting big ideas through the door at ADB
The challenge: The climate crisis demands big ideas and bold solutions, but nding suitable ADB projects to engage with can be by hit-and-miss for innovators in climate change technology.
The innovation: Build a database of pre-vetted big-idea climate solutions that ADB project o cers can access easily.
The story: More ferocious bush res, longer droughts, changed weather patterns, more people displaced by rising sea levels: the signs of climate change are there for us to see. And for Steve Peters, the oceans are also the place to look for evidence of a climate crisis that needs our full attention.
“If you look at ocean acidi cation, why is it important? Because for every carbon atom in the atmosphere, there are nine accessible in the sea or thereabouts,” he says. “So, the sea is a concentration of the problems that we have.”
A carbon-induced drop in the pH level of the ocean kills o phytoplanktons and zooplanktons, which play a key role in providing oxygen and sequestering carbon. “And most importantly, they’re the base of the marine food web or the food chain. So, when they go, that’s a lot of people who are not going to be able to eat sh protein,” says Peters. “It’s about 1.4 billion people around the world, a catastrophic outcome. Now, whether
or not this actually happens in this way, we simply don’t know. We know some species will do better, some will not under marine increased acidity, but for certain it’s going to change. And with change comes signi cant su ering and loss.”
With a loan portfolio of $37 billion in 2018, ADB has a great opportunity to have an impact on the climate change discussion, and it should, says Peters, not least because many of the people who will be most impacted live in ADB’s member countries.