Did COP30 move the dial for climate finance investment by asset owners?
According to Antonina Scheer of the Transition Pathway Initiative, one of the big wins of the COP30 summit was the lack of backsliding on climate finance after the US pulled out of the Paris Agreement (AP Photo/Joshua A Bickel)
Good morning. I’m now back at the FT’s London HQ after a week off to spend Thanksgiving in the US with the in-laws.
One of the bigger things to happen while I was away was the conclusion of the COP30 summit in Brazil. The COP summits obviously commit governments around the world to obligations towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions but they also encourage investors around the world to put their money into the climate transition.
So how did the latest summit do in this regard? We spoke to Antonina Scheer, deputy director for policy at the TPI Global Climate Transition Centre, part of the London School of Economics and Political Science and which is an asset owner-led research initiative.
Scheer, who attended the COP summit in Brazil, said the most important outcome was the lack of backsliding.
She said: “Stepping back to look at the big picture outcome of COP30, the main conclusion was that climate multilateralism didn’t collapse after the US exited the Paris Agreement earlier this year.
“As we move into a new phase in the low-carbon transition where global decarbonisation is definitively underway but facing serious political obstruction, the Brazilian presidency managed to hold climate multilateralism together.
“That’s a crucial signal of policy direction and continuity to the private sector and to investors.
“Investors will continue to invest in the low-carbon transition, thanks in part to this stabilising signal, but most importantly thanks to the economics of falling renewable energy technology costs.”
The COP30 summit reaffirmed the ‘Baku to Belem Roadmap’ (Baku being the host of the previous COP summit) which is aimed at mobilising at least $1.3tn a year towards climate action by 2035.
This, Scheer said, would allow individual countries to channel private finance towards the climate transition.
The summit also marked the submission of new nationally determined contributions (ie climate action plans submitted by each country as part of the Paris Agreement).
Scheer said: “These targets set the scene for decarbonisation across the globe and have implications for public spending, regulations and incentives.
“COP is the structure under which these targets are developed and ratcheted up over time. It will be at the domestic level that these become actionable goals, translated into sectoral roadmaps and policies.”
