Renewable energy financing must grow 7x to meet climate goals

The global body stated in a report that annual investments in non-fossil fuel energy in these Global South nations will need to increase from $260 billion to roughly $2 trillion in order to prevent temperatures from increasing to disastrous levels. “Financing clean energy in the emerging and developing world is the fault line of reaching international climate goals,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol stated.

The research was made public on the eve of the two-day Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris, which aims to rally support for modernizing the framework that governs financial flows from developed to poor countries from the middle of the 20th century.

The G20 countries historically account for 80% of the carbon emissions that are destroying the climate on Earth.

“Many vulnerable, lower-income states have been overwhelmed by economic shocks, debts they cannot pay, and the effects of climate change – a crisis to which they contributed very little, but which is costing people in these countries dearly,” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in a statement.

Private investment
The summit's top priorities include accelerating the switch to clean energy and assisting the Global South in coping with and preparing for catastrophic climate impacts.

The majority of them live in developing and underdeveloped nations, where there are about 800 million people without access to electricity and 2.4 billion without clean cooking fuels.

The principal cause of global warming, the burning of fossil fuels, will account for one-third of the increase in energy consumption in these countries over the next ten years if current policy trends continue, the IEA warned.

The bad news, according to Birol, is that more than 90% of the increase in clean energy investments since the Paris Agreement in 2015 has come from industrialized economies and China.

The research stressed the need for increased international technical, regulatory, and financial support in order to realize the potential for sustainable energy in emerging and developing nations.

Based on the IEA’s report, two-thirds of the financing for clean energy projects in emerging and developing economies excluding China “will need to come from the private sector” because public sector investments are “insufficient to deliver universal access to energy and tackle climate change”.

Private and public investment in renewable energy and other carbon-neutral energy sources will need to more than quadruple from $770 billion in 2022 to $2.5 trillion per year by the early 2030s, according to the calculation, which takes China into account. The current $135 billion in private financing for clean energy in these economies needs increase to nearly $1 trillion annually within the next ten years.

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