Specific details of initiatives are an essential outcome from the G7 Environment, Climate and Energy Ministers Meeting this week if we are to move towards a sustainable future writes Claire Marwick, Co-Manager of Aegon Asset Management’s Global Sustainable Equity Fund.
It is widely acknowledged that addressing the issue of climate change will require system-wide change to be driven by governments and supranational bodies. People and companies cannot individually bring about the scale of change necessary, although it is so important that we all play our part.
At a supranational level, governments have largely completed the work of agreeing in principle, and of setting targets, such as those laid out in 2015 in the Paris Agreement.
What we need now is the hard work and the detail of how we will make the energy transition. Which technologies will we use – heat pumps, hydrogen, electric vehicles – how will they be deployed, and how will we finance it?
We now need the detail – and the more specific, and practical, the better. This is not an easy task at all. Here in the UK, the government was recently reminded of this by the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee. The more specific the G7 Environment, Climate and Energy Ministers meeting this week can be, the more we welcome it.
