On 12 November, the European Investment Bank (EIB) Board of Directors approved the institution’s new Climate Bank Roadmap. The new strategy sets out how the EIB Group aims to support the objectives of the European Green Deal inside the EU and sustainable development outside the Union, and explicitly mentions cycling and walking infrastructure as supported investments.

The existing EIB Climate Strategy was announced at the Paris Climate Conference in 2015. The EIB Board of Directors approved an update of the strategy, to align it with the 1.5-degree temperature goal. Together with the Climate Bank Roadmap, this will guide the Bank’s activities in the next 5 years. By the end of this decade, the EIB Group aims to support at least €1 trillion in climate action and environmental sustainability investments.

The Roadmap comes at the end of a stakeholder engagement that included two major events in March and June and more than 200 written submissions to the Bank, and in which ECF participated. As a result, in the field of transport, investments in walking and cycling infrastructure are now explicitly mentioned as supported activities, whereas for example airport capacity expansion is not supported anymore. Modal shift is also mentioned as part of the decarbonisation pathway for the road sector.

The EIB has already sporadically financed projects centered on cycling in the past, for example by granting a € 12 million loan to a German manufacturer of innovative e-bike drive systems in 2019. This year, it has provided € 95 million to the City of Barcelona to finance 40 climate action projects, including improvement of cycling infrastructures and investments to regenerate an area covering some 200 000 m2 across the city, reshaping urban design around the concept of “superblocks”.

With the Climate Bank Roadmap, we hope that financing of active mobility by the EIB will be more systematic in the future, also supporting the priorities of other main EU funding instruments in the Recovery and Resilience Fund and the next Multiannual Financial Framework.

Full text of the EIB Climate Bank Roadmap

EIB Group Climate Bank Roadmap – Stakeholder engagement report