New G20 energy efficiency toolkit a “collaborative architecture” for policy makers and investors

A new toolkit has been launched that aims to act as a “collaborative architecture” for policy makers and investors to scale up energy efficiency investment in the G20 group of leading industrial nations.

“Greater collaboration is essential to addressing the G20 energy efficiency investment challenge,” the new report says. “Unprecedented” coordination and collaboration are needed to “identify and unlock” the benefits of greater energy efficiency.

“As no single stakeholder group can deliver the challenge of scaling-up G20 energy efficiency investment challenge alone, this Toolkit provides a collaborative architecture through which G20 policy makers can engage in a structured dialogue with investment providers.”

The toolkit has been put together by the G20 Energy Efficiency Finance Task Group, co-chaired by Mexico and France and is the culmination of three years work.

The group has rallied 122 banks and institutional investors with more than $4trn in support of G20 efforts to scale-up energy efficiency.

It says more work is needed to make energy efficiency “explicit and visible” within investor and company disclosures. In this regard, the recommendations from Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures are an “opportunity to scale up the existing voluntary work developed by the investment industry”.“On the investor side,” says Annie Degen, the UNEP Finance Initiative Coordinator for Energy Efficiency, in a blog
accompanying the launch, “the toolkit provides unique insights on how energy efficiency is integrated into investment practice, implicitly or directly, leveraging on the Principles for Responsible Investment’s reporting results, and CDP’s recent reports.”

“No single stakeholder group can deliver the challenge of scaling-up G20 energy efficiency investment”

The Toolkit provides a set of voluntary options for policy makers to scale up energy efficiency policies and financing tools and has been produced in the run-up to the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Hamburg in July.

It says the overall energy efficiency market has grown to $221bn of annual investment which is integrated in buildings, transport and industry – though much of this is “invisible” to financial players, who tend to only identify “core” energy efficiency investments as stand-alone projects where the delivery of energy savings is the lead driver of returns to the project owner.

“This Toolkit marks a turning point in G20 countries’ collaboration to scale up energy efficiency investments and finance,” said Peter Sweatman, technical lead for the group.