Projects: Finance | Overview | Technology | Economic Opportunity

Our work is currently organised into three themes:

Technology

A technological revolution is required if greenhouse gas emissions are to be cut dramatically enough to avoid a climate crisis. There is already a wealth of climate-friendly technology that can be put to use sooner and more widely; many more new inventions will be needed too. It is the GCN's view that governments must be at the heart of the low-carbon technology revolution, driving it with policy and finance.

We have recently published 'Breaking Through on Technology', a study examining the barriers to the development, commercialisation, deployment and 'transfer' of low-carbon technologies and setting out what governments need to do to overcome them. The study's findings emphasise the importance of technology to all GCN member countries, underlining an urgent need to place technology ‘front and centre’ in the international negotiations.

Finance is crucial to the technology narrative. The role for an international agreement is to ensure that there is a supply of money to help new technologies reach a mass market more quickly, especially in the developing world, where access to low-cost finance is limited.

Read our report: Breaking Through on Technology.

Finance

The technological revolution will not happen by accident. As well as government-led technology policy, public and private finance will be needed in large sums to ensure new inventions are demonstrated and then used widely and often before they are fully cost effective. This will require new financial thinking at the domestic level and between governments to determine how different sources of finance can be mobilised and chanelled effectively.

We have recently commenced a study anaylsing existing and identifying new politically sustainable sources of climate finance, and the capital and incremental costs of market creation policies to foster priority low-carbon technologies and sectors in GCN member countries.

Economic Opportunity

New technology promises opportunities for economies to develop new markets and diversify and create new jobs, but these will not be realised without government intervention. Our ongoing study of low-carbon employment in the energy sector argues that the bolder government policies to promote rapid growth in climate-friendly innovations and industries are, the higher the likelihood of new job creation on a significant scale.

The work also suggests that because of the openness of global markets, creating demand in one country will generate employment opportunities elsewhere. Since interconnectedness requires policy coordination, governments will need to work together if the benefits of low-carbon development are to be widespread and evenly distributed.

By the end of 2010, members of the Global Climate Network will have each published 'shadow' low carbon industrial strategies to help ensure governments are able to capitalise on the opportunities available to them in a new global low-carbon economy.

Read our report: Creating Opportunity: Low carbon jobs in an interconnected world.