By Laila Kearney
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Investment to spur the vital role the world’s cities can play in cutting emissions and waste as part of broader climate goals is falling short and still lags subsidies to fossil fuel, energy and environmental experts said at a conference on Wednesday.
The green recovery, or the environmentally-focused effort to rebuild the global economy from the COVID-19 pandemic, has attracted about $360 billion, or 17% of all the money flowing to financial rehabilitation, Rodolfo Lacy, a director at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), said.
“We are not giving to the environmental investments and we are not aligning the investments that cities or governments are doing with the long-term vision (of decarbonization),” Lacy said in an address at the Reuters Events: Energy Transition Conference.
Subsidies for fossil fuel companies, meanwhile, amount to $500 billion annually, Lacy said, citing OECD data.
“We need to reduce those harmful subsidies to the environment, and we need to start to think about phasing out infrastructure and technologies that we do not need for the future,” he said.
Bringing cities and towns in line with net-zero targets will require retrofitting existing buildings, phasing out old infrastructure, shifting to renewable energy sources and forming an energy efficient transportation system, experts said at the conference.
Cities must also find ways to reuse waste, said Jorge Barredo, who runs renewables, new business and innovations at Spanish electrical energy utilities company Naturgy, which has expanded its use of biogas.
The shift to decarbonize cities will require more investments from private industry, in addition to government funding, the experts said.
For more on the Reuters Events: Global Energy Transition conference please click here (https://reutersevents.com/events/energy-transition-global/)
(Reporting by Laila Kearney; editing by Barbara Lewis)
