Global leaders at the recently concluded World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS) emphasised the need for sustainable finance to fuel green growth.

The speakers emphasised the lack of new instruments to facilitate long-term lending to fuel green growth, particularly in emerging economies and least-developed countries.

Among the speakers, here’s a round-up of what six key global leaders said at the summit.

“Though renewable energy has received adequate funding, areas such as climate adaptation, sustainable consumption and production, biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, and pollution abatement have not received the necessary funding”: Dr Vibha Dhawan, Director General, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)

“Finance is central to combating climate change. The central question here is whether we can transform the global financial system to meet today’s challenges in ways that promote low-carbon, resilient growth”: Manish Bapna, President Natural Resources Defence Council, India

“ADB is currently developing innovative financing models to facilitate the transition to clean energy by financing the retirement of coal-fired power plants and repurposing them to provide renewable energy and grid services, as well as lending to countries to develop climate change policies”: Dr Pradeep Tharakan, Regional Advisor, South Asia, Asian Development Bank (ADB)

“Facilitating climate finance and diversifying the fiscal base to support green growth should lead the priorities list. Capacity building should be prioritised to achieve the necessary transformational change. Both national and sub-national finance ministries must boost their capacity with tools like green budgeting and carbon tax and pricing”: Helen Clarkson, CEO, The Climate Group

“We need three things: a vision of what we want to do, an inter-institutional framework to do what we want to do and leadership”: Laszlo Broberly, state counsellor to the prime minster of Romania

“Our recommendations on climate finance would be to expand the scope of climate finance and make climate smart transition of the financial sector overall,” according to the Green Development Pact. Also, rather than improving the resilience of existing infrastructure, let us build infrastructure that improves our resilience”: Jagjeet Singh Sareen, Principal, Dalberg Advisors

Source: ANI Press Release