ICC joins quest to unleash investment in energy efficiency and low carbon infrastructure

The workshops will take place back-to-back with the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) private sector advisory board meeting, where ICC will provide global business views on environment and energy issues.

The workshops will bring leading public and private actors together to inspire innovative cooperation and identify synergies to scale up investments in energy efficiency and infrastructure.

ICC and GGGI join with several co-organizers including the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, CDC Climat, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development the International Energy Agency, the Climate Policy Initiative, the Green Growth Action Alliance, the Global Green Growth Forum, along with SEB, Deutsche Bank and the Zurich insurance group to explore multi-stakeholder views on these two critical topics.

“In 2012, G20 members committed to working on inclusive green growth with a focus on developing countries. This remains an important topic on the G20 and global agenda. As the world business organization, ICC has a crucial role to play in helping develop enabling frameworks to drive investment in green growth,” said Carlos Busquets, ICC Deputy Director, and member of the GGGI advisory board. “Much of the potential for improving energy efficiency remains untapped worldwide, with investments generally lower than policy ambition. A key solution is to increase demand through long-term enabling policies and incentives, together with innovative financing models.”

Participants in the energy efficiency finance workshop will aim to: a) identify markets where improved access to affordable finance is critical in driving demand for energy efficiency; b) identify the key policies necessary to enable better access to affordable finance; and c) design concrete incentive and financing models.

A second workshop will examine how to involve institutional investors more actively in providing capital to sustainable infrastructure investments with a focus on developing and emerging countries.

“We put green growth at the heart of economic planning in emerging countries, so we see how infrastructure investments – in renewable energy technology, low-carbon infrastructure, etc. – can be limited by incomplete regulations and more generally by inadequate risk/reward profiles. Institutional investors shy away from investing directly in such projects by the absence of adequate vehicles which could rebalance risk and returns and provide the necessary scale and diversification,” said Nikolaus Schultze, Assistant Director-General, Public-Private Cooperation, at GGGI, a new interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder organization.

The results of the workshops will be fed into the Global Green Growth Forum, an annual summit of 200 world leaders, in Copenhagen in October.