The Asian Development Bank must collaborate with others to meet the “immense” challenges that Asia and the rest of the globe face, its director general told CNBC on Friday.

“The challenge that we are facing in this region and also globally, are immense, including climate change. pandemic and natural disasters,” Tomoyuki Kimura told CNBC’s Tanvir Gill on the sidelines of the G20 Summit held in the Indian capital of New Delhi.

He highlighted that several nations had to increase their borrowing after Covid. Therefore, this serves as a restriction on how much debt certain nations can incur to address climate change and sustainable development.

Multilateral development banks, according to him, “can and must take bold action to help address the challenges.”

The ADB “very much welcomes the efforts by all parties to ensure MDBs are well equipped to play this critical role,” he said, adding: “We also welcome India’s strong leadership advocacy for the importance of multilateralism.”

In addition, the director general emphasised that more has to be done and that ADB’s financing capacity needs to be increased in order to assist nations in achieving their climate targets.

“First of all, we need to ramp up our lending capacity … but also, we need extra efforts to mobilize more money from private sector,” he said.

The World Bank estimates that developing countries require more than $1 trillion annually to make major progress in the climate transition.

Kimura urged the creation of more urgent pipelines, the de-risking of projects, and reaffirmed the bank’s role in assisting nations in mobilising their own domestic resources in order to support the goals of climate financing.

“We also need to play a very important role in overall debt issues,” Kimura said, highlighting that many countries have taken more debt following the pandemic.

The United Nations predicted in July that the total amount of public debt worldwide will reach a staggering high of $92 trillion by 2022.

“So this is a limitation for different countries to take more debt for their sustainable development and climate change,” Kimura said.

By 2022, the entire amount of public debt worldwide is expected to soar to an astounding high of $92 trillion, according to a prediction made by the UN in July.

(Adapted from CNBC.com)

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