After months of contentious negotiations, the governing board of the European Investment Bank, the EU’s lending arm, voted yesterday to convert itself into a ‘climate bank’ – delivering a major policy promise of incoming EU Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen.
With this decision, the EIB becomes the first multilateral development bank to commit to phasing out lending to all fossil fuels. The bank already ended its lending to coal in 2013, and this decision extends the policy to oil and gas.
