The International Energy Agency (IEA) is planning to publish a comprehensive roadmap on how the global energy sector can reach net zero by 2050, according to its executive director Fatih Birol writing in today’s Financial Times newspaper.
Birol (pictured) said in the article that the roadmap, which will be released in May, will set out “detailed analysis” of what needs to be done across the world’s economy to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and put greenhouse gas emissions on a path in line with a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
He added that the paper will be “vital” ahead of the next UN climate change conference (COP 26) to be held in the UK in November, where countries will set out the latest plans for reducing their emissions.
“We must ensure our collective aspirations can be turned into hard reality because promises, however well intentioned, can be broken,” Birol wrote in the FT.
He noted how the UK and the Netherlands have set up domestic legal structures to “hold governments of today accountable for delivering on their promises for tomorrow”.
However, “national approaches are not enough to achieve the change we need – we must think globally”, Birol wrote.
This will involve improved mechanisms to co-ordinate support for emerging and developing economies to give them access quickly to “knowhow, financing and technologies to provide clean and reliable energy for all their citizens”.
There will also need to be stronger global efforts to “drive innovation and deployment of new technologies”, Birol said in the article.