Brussels, 01/12/2015 (Agence Europe) - On the sidelines of the fine, high-level speeches, a broad coalition of states was born at COP 21 on Monday 30 November to increase public and private investment in clean energy under “Mission Innovation”.
Matching words with action, 19 countries, including five from the EU (Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom) made a commitment, over the course of the next five years, to double the funding for public research on energy efficiency, low-carbon technology and renewable energy within the framework of the Mission, which had been officially launched by François Hollande, Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
The goals of the initiative are manifold: to provide R&D with the wherewithal to be able to play a decisive role in tackling climate change; to ensure that public and private efforts work in concert so that projects can be rolled out more speedily and more cheaply; to promote wide dissemination of the technologies; to provide developing countries with access to reliable and affordable energy as part of immediately carbon-free development.
French Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy Minister Ségolène Royal, who heads the French delegation to COP 21, hailed “an initiative which will speed up green growth across the world”. France has pledged to double its public investment in R&D into energy transition over the next five years, compared with the average level of investment between 2012 and 2015. The US government has undertaken to double its current level of investment in R&D into clean energy within five years. In addition to the United States and the five EU member states, the coalition brings together Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)