IEA charts three year, $3 trillion path for a green global recovery.

The International Energy Agency has laid out a $3 trillion green recovery plan, offering governments around the world a “once-in-a-lifetime” roadmap to sustainably rebuild their economies in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Sustainable Recovery report, published Thursday, is designed to present world leaders with cost-effective measures that could be implemented from 2021 through to 2023. It sets out three main goals: spurring economic growth, creating jobs and building more resilient and cleaner energy systems.

“As they design economic recovery plans, policymakers are having to make enormously consequential decisions in a very short space of time,” Fatih Birol, executive director at the IEA, said in the report. “These decisions will shape economic and energy infrastructure for decades to come and will almost certainly determine whether the world has a chance of meeting its long-term energy and climate goals.”

The Sustainable Recovery plan was published in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund as part of the energy agency’s flagship World Energy Outlook series. It is based on the assessments of over 30 specific energy policy measures and spans six key sectors: electricity, transport, industry, buildings, fuels and emerging low-carbon technologies.

The IEA believes the plan could add 1.1 percentage points to global economic growth each year through to 2023. It says it could also save or create approximately nine million jobs a year over the next three years and reduce global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions by 4.5 billion tons by the end of the plan.

Achieving those results would require global investment of around $1 trillion annually over the next three years. This represents about 0.7% of global gross domestic product (GDP).

18 June 2020

IEEFA