The WorldWide Climate Change Conference COP26 will fall well short of its vision of weaning the world off fossil fuels if developing world, which is heavily dependent on coal, does not get the assistance needed to adapt, leaders told a climate conference on Tuesday hosted by the Reuters news agency.
Usha Rao-Monari, deputy manager of the United Nations development program, had said that less than a fifth of the global investment in clean energy now goes to the poorest two-thirds of the world’s population.
Usha Rao-Monari, the director-general of the United Nations Development Programme, says that emissions of greenhouse gases from hydroelectric power stations in industrialised countries have dropped by 20% since 2012, but coal, one of the dirtiest fuels, still represents 44% of energy use in the emerging regions, where emissions have risen by 20%.
Makhtar Diop, executive director of the Global Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s investment arm, said these and other multilateral lenders were working to make green investments “bankable” in emerging markets.
This includes the development of innovative financing structures aimed at “de-risk” environmentally sound projects for private sector investors.
Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Program, said it was crucial that financial industries begins to think longer term, aided the transition from fossil fuels, and that a global carbon market, in keeping with the full impact of emissions, would be helpful.
Francesco Starace, chief executive of Europe’s biggest energy provider, Enel (ENEI.MI), said the transition away from fossil fuels must ensure that everyone on the planet has access to electricity, which means clean, affordable and renewable.
For Enel’s Starace – who transformed the utility into a green power plant for years – one of the key issues for COP26, and beyond, was whether the inevitable move away from fossil fuels would be tumultuous, planned, or, thus, inclusive.
