Norwegian climate negotiators should push other countries attending climate talks in Dubai to follow its lead in adopting guarantees to drive investment into renewable energy projects in developing countries, according to former British prime minister Gordon Brown.
“If Norway now takes leadership such that this can be a global initiative that triggers the necessary billions for the global south, then the doomed climate meeting in Dubai may actually be a breakthrough,” Brown wrote in Norway’s Dagens Naeringsliv newspaper.
“It could break the deadlock that makes the annual rounds of climate meetings fruitless and self-defeating.”
Norway’s government proposed a state guarantee program for renewable energy investments in developing countries in its budget in October. It’s aimed at cutting some of the risk associated with projects to encourage a boost in funding from the private sector.
Oil and gas companies have earned record profits in recent years, but it’s the governments of the Gulf countries and Norway that are the biggest winners, Brown said.
Norway, whose export revenues from petroleum more than doubled in 2022, should therefore “recycle some of these unexpected oil and gas revenues,” he said.
Back in 2021, during the COP26 talks in Glasgow, wealthy countries committed to raising annual climate financing to $100 billion, renewing a target that they fell short of at the end of last decade.
