Financing for clean energy in developing and emerging economies excluding China must increase sevenfold within a decade if global warming is to be capped at tolerable levels, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said yesterday.
To keep the Paris Agreement’s climate temperature goals in play, annual investment for non-fossil fuel energy in these countries would need to rise from US$260 billion to nearly US$2 trillion, the intergovernmental agency said in a report.
“Financing clean energy in the emerging and developing world is the fault line of reaching international climate goals,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol told journalists in a briefing on Tuesday.
Photo: AFP
The report comes on the eve of the two-day Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris, which seeks to galvanize support for revamping the mid-20th century architecture governing financial flows from rich to developing nations.
Speeding the transition from dirty to clean energy, and helping the Global South cope with and prepare for the devastating effects of climate change are high on the summit agenda.
Virtually all of the nearly 800 million people lacking electricity and the 2.4 billion without access to clean cooking fuels are in poor and emerging countries.
Under current policy trends, one-third of the rise in energy use in these nations over the next decade would be met by burning fossil fuels, the main driver of global warming, the IEA said.
“Clean energy investments is increasing gradually — this is a good news,” Birol said.
“The bad news is that more than 90 percent of that increase in clean energy since the Paris Agreement in 2015 comes from advanced economies and China,” he said.
“Only 10 percent comes from the emerging and developing countries,” he added. “We need to change this trend.”
With China included in the calculation, private and public money pouring into renewables and other forms of carbon neutral energy would need to more than triple from US$770 billion last year to about US$2.5 trillion per year by the early 2030s.
Investment must remain at those levels until mid-century to help keep Earth’s average surface temperature rising “well below” 2°C, and 1.5°C if possible, the Paris climate treaty’s binding and aspirational targets respectively.
The potential for rapidly ramping up renewable energy is there, the report said.
At least 40 percent of the global solar radiation reaching the planet lands on sub-Saharan Africa, and solar energy is now the cheapest source of electricity generation across almost the entire world.
Yet, nearly 10 times more solar photovoltaic capacity was installed last year in China — about 100 gigawatts — than across the entire African continent.
Sunny sub-Saharan Africa generates less solar electricity than the Netherlands, Birol said.
Two-thirds of the finance for clean energy projects in emerging and developing economies excluding China would need to come from the private sector, the report said.
Today’s US$135 billion in annual private financing for clean energy in these economies must rise to about US$1 trillion a year within the next decade
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