Financing green growth: breakthroughs under development

Can we meet emerging economies’ rapidly growing needs for water, food and energy in a way that manages limited global resources and shifts us onto a low-carbon path? And how can we pay for this, even as the shockwaves from the global economic crisis continue to reverberate?

Those are the questions we will be looking to answer at the Annual Meeting in Davos on Friday morning in a dynamic private session designed to engage leading CEOs, such as Bob Diamond of Barclays Capital and his peers from the energy and infrastructure sectors, with emerging economy government leaders like Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga who are competing to attract capital for renewable energy, low-carbon transport and green agricultural development. Donor governments and agencies will also contribute ideas for new forms of support for green growth financing.

These leaders will be given a challenge by President Calderon, who hosts the G20 in 2012 and has announced that green growth will be a key theme. He will ask for breakthrough financing models that use government seed funding to catalyse much larger private investment in green infrastructure. The discussions will explore a range of ideas that can be advanced by banks, donor governments, insurance companies and corporations. The Forum expects UK Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell to launch a new “CP3” (Climate Public-Private Partnership) Fund in Davos, designed to leverage up to US$ 1.5 billion of private finance into new clean energy and low-carbon infrastructure investment. This idea was developed during World Economic Forum Annual Meeting sessions in 2009, demonstrating that these dialogues can lead to tangible results. Given this sort of leadership and the challenge from President Calderon to deliver a Blueprint for Green Infrastructure Finance, expectations for the session – and for the 2012 G20 – are high.

For more on the Forum’s work on Financing Green Growth, including the development of financing models for solar energy in India, water resource planning in South Africa and green growth corridors in Tanzania, see the Forum’s recent  Financing Green Growth in a Resource Constrained World report.