Tokyo, May 3:

Perhaps the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is doing its job too well. With the vast majority of Asia projected to escape poverty in 15 years, a development bank chartered four deca-des ago to end poverty is struggling to stay relevant.

Moreover, the breakneck economic development that the bank helped spur with its loans has unleashed a wave of environmental woes the bank is now trying to reverse.

Overhauling the ADB and addressing environmental problems triggered by development will headline the agenda when the Manilla, Philippines-based bank opens its annual meeting in the western Japanese city of Kyoto on Friday. Just a decade after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Asia is standing on its own two feet. But its rapidly increasing wealth is now posing new challenges of its own.

In Kyoto, some 3,000 delegates from the ADB’s 67 member governments will review a set of recommendations issued earlier in early April by a blue-ribbon panel of experts on how to update the ADB’s basic mission from poverty alleviation - given that about 90 per cent of the region’s people will be ‘middle income’ by 2020.

“In this transformed Asia, the main policy challenges facing most countries will change very fundamentally, from fighting extensive poverty to tackling issues arising from economic success.”