Opportunities and Means to Support Low-Emission Transitions

The urgency to accelerate efforts to support countries’ low-emission transition cannot be emphasized more. According to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, far-reaching transitions are needed across sectors and systems to secure a sustainable future for all. Moreover, the outcome of the first Global Stocktake has provided a comprehensive roadmap as to how efforts could be scaled across sectors and areas to achieve economy-wide reductions. These include targets to triple renewable energy capacity globally and double global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, as well as rapid development of zero and low-emission vehicles, among others.

In particular, economy-wide transition cannot be achieved without active participation of industries, especially those in hard-to-abate and heavy-emitting sectors (e.g., transport, manufacturing, real estate). In recent years, there is a growing number of companies in such sectors, which are increasingly aware of the need and urgency to transform how businesses are conducted in light of the physical and transition climate risks. Accordingly, many good practices are emerging in such industries, which could be shared and further scaled to incentive the progress of low-emission transition.

In pursuit of continuous and ambitious endeavours, increased means of implementation are required to enable a whole-of-society low-emission transition. This entails more effective means to catalyse climate finance, support green technology development as well as build capacity of countries and clients. Effective means are also instrumental to incentivize countries to devise more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the next round of submissions, so that climate actions are more integrated into broader development planning.