It’s warm and tropically humid in Lima, Peru, where I’m visiting for a week of climate finance meetings and conferences revolving around the UN Climate Change negotiations. Expectations from the conference are low, but there's a lot about other ways of mobilizing private sector capital - give the scale of the investment challenge, that's the main game.
Peru is a huge country that’s been growing economically like an Asian Tiger; poverty rates have been more than halved over the past decade, with palpable changes. A taxi driver today explained that he hadn’t been to school at all growing up in the Amazon basin; he beamed with pride talking about how his two children were going to university.
Climate change is not a topic people even know about; they worry about more immediate issues, including the traffic. But Peru is going to have a big share of climate change related problems; the country has contributed just 0.4% of the world's greenhouse gases, but is ranked third (after Bangladesh and Honduras) in climate hazard risks by the UK's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
Global emissions last year increased at the highest rate in 20 years. Shifting capital into climate solutions is urgent.
I spent yesterday giving talks on that subject at a “Climate Change and Financial Mechanism” seminar at the Chinese Government Pavilion conference, at the “Zero Poverty. Zero emissions” conference and WRI’s “Latin American and Caribbean Climate Finance Day”. UN climate conferences bring together a lot of the world’s climate finance people, and it’s go-go. Today it’s the Transport Day 2014 conference. All about growing low-carbon transport.
If you’re in Lima let me know, or catch me at:
- Monday: IDFC and New Climate Economy side events at the COP venue.
- Tuesday AM Climate Action conference, Westin Hotel.
- Tuesday 14.30 @IETA Pavilions: I’m speaking at a “Dialogue on Public & Private Green Financial Innovations”, with GGGI’s Yvo de Boer, EBRD’s Suma Chakrabarti, the legendary ex-World Bank Chief Economist Kenneth Lay, low-carbon agri financier extraordinaire Christina de Valle, World Bank Group climate finance supremo Vikram Widge.
- Wednesday 7:30: OECD breakfast on “Institutional investors and green infrastructure: Translating solutions to action”. Then World Climate Summit @Hilton, then COP.
- Thursday 13:00: Peruvian Government and UN Secretary-General’s meeting on “Following up on Cooperative Climate Initiatives to Accelerate Climate Action”. I’m talking about green bonds in 2015.
