The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has already surpassed its 2025 climate finance goal, announced the bank at the 2025 International Energy Transition Forum held in east China's Jiangsu Province from Wednesday to Friday.
The bank's vice president, Ajay Bhushan Pandey, noted that the multilateral development bank has always had a clear focus in green infrastructure when speaking with China Global Television Network (CGTN) on the sidelines of the forum.
"If you see during the last about 10 years, AIIB has invested in more than 320 projects across 38 countries in the world. Energy sector has got the highest investment - almost about 24 percent. If you look at the total size of the approved projects during the last 10 years, I think today we have about 62 billion U.S. dollars, which is the approved projects," said Pandey.
"As I mentioned that our focus is the green infrastructure. Every project that we, we assess whether it is Paris agreement-aligned, how much money goes into the climate finance. Last year out of our total financing, 67 percent went towards the climate finance, even though our objective was that by 2025, 50 percent of our financing should go towards the climate. But we already achieved it and surpassed it by 2024. That is 67 percent," he said. Founded in 2015, AIIB has grown from 57 founding members to 110 across six continents, covering 81 percent of the world's population and 65 percent of global GDP.
AIIB exceeds climate finance target: vice president
Smart technologies have reshaped China's ecological and environmental monitoring system, Huang Runqiu, minister of Ecology and Environment, said Thursday in Beijing on the sidelines of the fourth session of the 14th National People's Congress(NPC).
"Regarding ecological and environmental monitoring, we have been promoting the digitalization, informatization, and intelligentization of the entire monitoring process in recent years, reshaping the ecological and environmental monitoring system. For instance, in water environment monitoring and sampling, we have used intelligent drones which can quickly locate sampling points, collect samples accurately, return rapidly, and they are safe and reliable, improving work efficiency by over 70 percent. They are particularly advantageous for sampling during flood seasons and in remote areas," Huang told the press.
"In terms of environmental sample analysis, we have developed 'lights-out laboratories' in recent years. As the name suggests, these labs operate without lights and are unattended. Through robotic arms, robots, and intelligent management systems, they achieve full-process automation and intelligence from sample handover, testing, and analysis to report generation. This has significantly enhanced work efficiency, increasing it by more than eightfold compared to traditional labs. More importantly, it reduces human interference, human error, and even data falsification," he said.
Thanks to the improved ecological and environmental supervision capabilities, the number of environmental violation cases nationwide has decreased from 130,000 five years ago to 43,000 last year, representing a decline of 68 percent, Huang said.
The minister said China has already applied environmental DNA technology in the biodiversity monitoring work.
"In the field of biodiversity monitoring, monitoring aquatic organisms remains a weak point. However, significant progress has been made in recent years as we have developed environmental DNA technology. Although this chip is very small in size, it contains DNA detection information for aquatic organisms, including the finless porpoise and the Chinese sucker, from 19 state-controlled sections in the Jiangsu segment of the Yangtze River. The results showed that over the past five years, more than 20 species of aquatic organisms have increased in this river section, fully demonstrating the tangible effectiveness of the ten-year fishing ban in the Yangtze River," Huang said while showing a chip to reporters.
The 14th NPC, China's national legislature, concluded its fourth session on Thursday.
Smart technologies reshape China's ecological, environmental monitoring system: minister
