A Wake-Up Call on Climate Change: Giving People and The Planet What They Need

Help poor nations locate and create a complete package of bundled, bankable climate projects: The goal is to encourage climate investments, particularly through skill building or by producing specialized guides, to assist countries in unlocking more high-quality climate finance.

To promote the development of climate finance platforms, create a global center or marketplace for climate finance: A global hub or marketplace would enable to facilitate the meeting of supply (e.g., public and private actors from developed countries, MDBs, philanthropies) and demand (e.g., developing countries) of climate finance and enable to accelerate and scale the creation of climate finance platforms. Developing countries struggle with managing funding procedures quickly and finding the right set of partners to access climate finance.

Energy Future Investment: Green Hydrogen

Today, natural gas is mostly used to manufacture 90 Mt of hydrogen each year. In 2020, less than 0.5% of this hydrogen was generated using renewable energy. In order to refine oil and make ammonia or methanol, the oil and gas and chemical sectors account for 95% of the world's current demand for hydrogen. Both industrialized nations and emerging market economies have proposed aggressive policy goals for hydrogen uptake. In the meantime, the hydrogen value chain has seen the development of a pipeline of mature project proposals. Approximately 680 proposals for large-scale hydrogen projects totaling USD 240 billion have been made as of today, however only 10% (USD 22 billion) have resulted in a final investment choice (FID). 

Only two of these projects---and only one of those has been commissioned thus far---are situated in emerging markets. Current global plans for electrolyzers aim for 100 GW by 2030, and developed economies have already proposed aggressive regulatory targets for hydrogen imports. In response to the RePowerEU plan to phase out imports of fossil fuels far before 2030, the EU has established an ambitious hydrogen target of 20 MT by that time. This includes a target of 10 MT for both domestic EU hydrogen supply and imports of hydrogen from outside the EU. 

It is clear that developing nations and emerging economies are falling behind in the deployment of green hydrogen projects as a result of numerous difficulties, including certification, storage, mobility, and transportation. Another issue is that green hydrogen is very expensive and therefore not commercially viable. Such obstacles will be solved by the continuing advancement of technology and the predicted novel solutions in this area. Until then, practical issues that have been raised by the private sector, investors, and potential producing nations worldwide may slow down the rapid at-scale production of green hydrogen. These issues include cost barriers brought on by the absence of risk-free investment opportunities, vibrant green product markets, and ambitious policy frameworks. 

The goal of this multi-stakeholder roundtable is to promote communication across nations along the entire value chain for green hydrogen. The goal of the session is to enable a thorough discussion on the future of energy, with a particular focus on hydrogen. Its aim is to enable a better understanding of the current status of hydrogen production, anticipated scenarios of production to meet needs, as well as the current and future policies and their impact on that goal. The debate will be based on the analysis, findings, and conclusions of the relevant fora as well as the Glasgow Breakthrough on Hydrogen.

Water Security

At both the local (such as the Lusaka Water Security Initiative to protect water in Zambia) and international levels (such as the Pacific Institute which produces research and informational resources about water conservation globally), there are numerous initiatives being launched to improve water security in water-stressed countries. Additionally, coordinated action is taken to protect water resources, such as the Ramsar Convention, which was established in 1975 and is assisting in the preservation of more than 2,000 wetlands, or the Water Convention, which was established in 1992 and is currently ratified by more than 40 parties and aims to enhance the management and protection of transboundary water sources (both surface and groundwater). 

To manage transboundary water sources properly, numerous steps are being implemented. Indeed, 129 of the 153 countries that share transboundary waters submitted practical agreements for transboundary water cooperation, according to the monitoring exercise carried out in 2020 jointly by UNECE and UNESCO. Following are a few examples of these arrangements:

• The Mekong River Commission was established in 1995 to improve the Mekong River's sustainable management among the nations it flows through (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam), ensuring a win-win situation for the local people and businesses.

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