Global talks ahead of this year’s COP29 climate summit must find a way to boost the share of clean energy investments in emerging economies, which has “remained flat” over the last 10 years, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in an interview with Bloomberg, Report informs.
Discussions about increasing funds to help poorer countries fight global warming and how the money will be divided among them are still ongoing, “with different if not opposing views on the topic,” he noted.
Ahead of COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan in November, countries are working out details of a new annual climate finance goal, which is likely to be at least hundreds of billions of dollars. The topic has become controversial at UN summits, as a previous climate finance goal set in 2009 to deliver $100 billion per year by 2020 to poorer nations was only hit once, in 2022, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Birol said overall global clean energy investments are growing significantly, but the amount of money going to emerging and developing countries has “remained flat” at 15% of the total amount since 2015. It is currently about $250 billion, he said.
“So, this, in my view, is the fault line of our journey to reach our climate target,” he said. “This will be the key topic for our high-level dialogues with our colleagues from Azerbaijan and the rest of the countries.”