ADB’s Urban Financing Partnership Facility is a useful reminder that one of the largest constraints on urban resilience can appear before construction begins. The straightforward reading is that the facility helps cities finance and implement sustainable infrastructure, including through technical assistance and several specialist trust funds. The more interesting mechanism is project formation: cities need help identifying priorities, preparing credible proposals, strengthening institutions and connecting those proposals to downstream capital. ADB reported $19.52 million in new technical-assistance approvals in 2025 within a facility that sits upstream of much larger infrastructure investments. This suggests that project preparation is not administrative overhead around climate finance but part of the infrastructure that allows climate finance to exist at all. For shared resilience, the implication is that societies need standing capabilities capable of turning recognised risks into projects that public institutions and investors can actually approve, finance and maintain. The question is why development systems continue to celebrate the capital eventually mobilised while often treating the comparatively small amount of money that creates the pipeline as secondary.
Asian Development Bank – Urban Financing Partnership Facility Annual Report 2025
Written by
Arunabha Bhattacharya 
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