The 16th World Future Energy Summit, hosted by Masdar, opened in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday with calls for cooperative action to ensure that average global temperatures do not exceed pre-industrial times by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. The stormy Gulf rains serve as a timely reminder of the need for urgent climate action.
Sheikha Shamma Bint Sultan Bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, President and CEO of the UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA), gave the opening keynote address for the three-day event at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (Adnec). She praised the recent cooperative launch of the Roadmap to 1.5°C by the COP Presidencies Troika, which consists of the UAE and the next two COP hosts, Azerbaijan and Brazil.
Sheikha Shamma proposed “Blended Finance” as a potential remedy, roughly characterized as combining public concessional financing with public or private capital. The approach is becoming more widely acknowledged as a crucial means of providing the funding required to combat climate change. With a total of US$14.2 billion in committed financing, a recent examination of blended finance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) conducted by UICCA, Convergence, and HSBC revealed that the financial model is still in its early stages. This amounts to 7% of all blended transactions worldwide, with blended transactions relating to climate change totaling about $7 billion.
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