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New Green Drivers of Growth

At a time of insufficient global demand and fiscal constraints in the developed countries, there is an urgent need for new drivers of growth. The initiatives described in a new UN report offer a major opportunity to reorient the global economy towards resource-saving, low-carbon growth by using limited public resources to stimulate large-scale private investment.

FRANKFURT – United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has just released the final report of his High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing (AGF). As the two private-sector members of the AGF, we are proud of our work. The report lays out the available options for mobilizing $100 billion annually for climate-change mitigation and adaptation in developing countries, and establishes the conditions that would make it possible to achieve this goal by 2020.

One essential condition is setting a robust carbon price of $25 per ton of CO2 in order to unleash the large private-sector investments that are necessary to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy. We are concerned, however, that the political will for carbon pricing is lacking.

The world cannot wait until 2020 to find the necessary resolve: while international negotiations drag on and the momentum that has been generated in the private sector is in danger of dissipating, global warming is progressing. There is an urgent need to start producing concrete results now, based on several promising initiatives that deserve to be scaled up.

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