Page 5 - AsiaElec Week 32 2021
P. 5
AsiaElec COMMENTARY AsiaElec
scaling up investment into future resilience and prosperity,” said Kate Levick, associate director, sustainable finance, at E3G, a European climate change think tank.
The report is good news for renewable energy developers and their investors, as the price of renewable energy projects is in most cases now lower than fossil fuel generation in most countries worldwide.
As such, the report will make it more urgent for governments to make deeper commitments to reducing emissions.
UN Secretary General António Guterres said this week that the report required government to improve their Nationally Determined Contri- butions (NDCs), their commitments to reduc- ing emission in the coming years.
He also said that the report should stimulate further abandonment of fossil fuels.
“This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our
planet. There must be no new coal plants built after 2021. OECD countries must phase out existing coal by 2030, with all others following suit by 2040. Countries should also end all new fossil fuel exploration and production, and shift fossil-fuel subsidies into renewable energy,” he said.
To conclude, the report gives stronger scien- tific basis for the causes of global warming and offers some direction on how to deal with it.
Perhaps most importantly, this report stresses businesses and investors cannot ignore climate change and must put it at the very centre of their investment strategies.
The report argues that reducing emissions as quickly as possible is the only way out of the climate crisis. For carbon-intensive businesses, this means that finding ways to reduce emis- sions and to pay for the cost of the carbon they continue to produce will dictate their revenues, profits and future investment strategies.
Week 32 11•August•2021 w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m P5
