The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has committed to align all of its new investments with the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change from 1 July 2023. As it reached this deadline, the AIIB published its first “Methodology for assessing the alignment of AIIB investment operations with the Paris Agreement...

In March 2023, in the void of a public consultation on the AIIB’s draft Paris alignment methodology, three civil society organisations – Recourse, BRICS Feminist Watch and CLEAN (Coastal Livelihood and Environmental Action Network) – published a report outlining what the AIIB’s Paris alignment methodology should include called Beyond Paris: How the AIIB can align its policy and practice to the Paris Agreement.

This briefing examines the AIIB’s Paris alignment methodology against some of the main benchmarks in the Beyond Paris report. It finds that AIIB’s Paris alignment methodology do not contribute to the Paris Agreement’s goal to reduce global warming to 1.5°C in a meaningful way. Instead, they reduce Paris alignment to a box ticking exercise, without accountability to the urgent steps the world must take to avoid catastrophic climate change...

It claims that AIIB’s Paris alignment methodology sets out to justify ‘business-as-usual’, including further widening the loopholes for fossil fuels, in particular for fossil gas. It also fails to include essential rights-based approaches in the alignment methodology, such as gender considerations, despite the particularly negative impacts on women from climate change, while undermining the case for sustainable renewable energy options.