Financing low-carbon technology

A new paper by Oxford University researchers says that rich countries need to pay the full incremental cost of low-carbon technology for developing countries to avoid dangerous climate change.

The authors argue that transferring the most efficient low-carbon technologies to developing countries with the fastest growing emissions, such as China and India, is ‘the key to a substantive agreement in Copenhagen’.

They also stress that without an ambitious technology transfer strategy agreement ‘there is little prospect of a credible deal emerging at the Copenhagen summit, or in post-Copenhagen negotiations’.

The paper ‘Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change – Why Financing to Technology Transfer Matters’, by Dr Arunabha Ghosh and Dr Kevin Watkins, states that to avoid an increase in global temperatures of 2°C, global emissions will need to halve by 2050. Yet the authors point out that current projections show emissions are on course to increase by 45 per cent by 2050, with more than 90 per cent of that increase projected to originate in developing countries.