Can you talk about you or your company’s efforts relating to renewability, sustainability or other environmentally- friendly activities?

ADB is Asia and the Pacific’s climate bank, and we have a long history of screening investments for environmental impact and working with clients to enhance their environmental performance. These efforts have assumed a new urgency in recent years in response to the scale of the climate challenge.

ADB will achieve full alignment of our sovereign operations with the Paris Agreement by 1 July 2023. Alignment of our non-sovereign operations will reach 85% by 1 July 2023 and 100% by 1 July 2025. We have also raised our ambition for cumulative climate financing from our own resources to US$100bn for the period 2019-2030. These commitments will mobilise even larger investments from our private sector, government and philanthropic financing partners.

Our work in the sustainability space is very broad – spanning law and policy reform through transaction advisory and downstream financing. We offer a broad range of financing products to our private sector clients from traditional project finance through corporate finance, thematic bonds, risk participations, mezzanine and equity. In addition, ADB has a large program of lending and other assistance to its developing member country governments.

ADB has played a key role over the years in pioneering the financing of mitigation and adaptation activities in our markets of focus in areas such as utility-scale and distributed renewable energy, e-transport, water and waste management, agribusiness and the health sector, among others.

In response to the climate challenge, ADB is increasingly deploying blended finance solutions to bridge financing gaps and market failures. This involves deploying finance on concessional terms alongside market-based finance to address specific project risks, bankability issues or to facilitate a pilot or demonstration project. This is a trend we expect to see continue considering the finance community’s increasing focus on transition finance for high emission sectors, as well as bankability challenges faced in some of our markets.

Why are in-house lawyers well-placed to drive change in their organisations?

We’re often fortunate that our roles afford us a 360-degree view across the organisation and this can really help to spot not only opportunities for change but also where the roadblocks may lie.

The focus of many of the team at ADB is transactional and here we really benefit from an approach that sees us engaged from very early at the stage of feasibility assessment all the way through to maturity of/exit from our financing. This end-to-end involvement places us very well to play a constructive role in changed approaches to our products, policies and business processes.

More broadly, effectiveness in in-house roles requires a solutions-oriented approach and strong negotiation and influencing skills which are obviously important in the context of organisational change initiatives.

Many change programs are of course anchored in refreshed or updated organisational strategies, visions or values. I think the depth of our engagement across our organisations teamed with the approach we bring by virtue of our training as lawyers, equips us well to articulate how these changes need to translate to our day-to-day roles. In a sense this helps us advocate for, and indeed embody in our work, the change our organisations are striving for.