By David Lawder WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury and the U.
S. Agency for International Development are calling leaders of multilateral development banks into an urgent meeting on extreme heat and its devastating impact on developing countries, according to Treasury officials. The private, virtual meeting on Thursday morning - the first of its kind - is aimed at finding ways to shift more resources to help countries build climate resilience and adaptation to reduce extreme heat damage amid a summer of record temperatures globally, the Treasury officials told Reuters.
While investments to fight climate change have increased dramatically in recent years, much of that growth has gone towards the transition to clean energy sources and reducing carbon emissions, not in helping countries adapt to the harmful impacts, including more severe droughts, wildfires, violent storms and rising ocean levels. As heatwaves grip the world and claim at least hundreds of lives, U.S.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will use the meeting to tie the urgent needs of developing countries hardest hit by devastating temperatures to broader work that multilateral development banks are doing to increase their lending capacity to help fight climate change and other global crises. "Extreme weather events, including heat waves, continue to become increasingly severe and frequent, from the East Coast of the United States to India," Yellen said in remarks to the MDBs seen by Reuters. "Mitigating and resp.