G20 working group on sustainable finance for facilitating flow of pvt capital to fund green carbon tech

The G-20 working group on sustainable finance has made a case for facilitating flow of private capital to fund investment in green carbon technologies through policies and financial instruments with a view to mitigating the impact of climate change, an official said on Wednesday.

It also underlined the need for creating an enabling framework for startups to come up with new technologies to reduce carbon emissions. The outcome of the three-day meeting of the G-20 sustainable finance working group, held at Mahabalipuram, would be taken up at the meeting of the G-20 Finance Ministers and central bank governors on July 17-18 in Gandhinagar. Briefing reporters after the meeting, Geetu Joshi, advisor in the Department of Economic Affairs, said the sustainable finance working group in its third meeting has “finalised key deliverables” for the year under India’s G-20 Presidency.

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“The finalised version of G-20 Sustainable finance deliverables under the Indian presidency consists of voluntary recommendations which have been finalized through consensus and collaborative approach. We have broadly made recommendations for a list of options to expand de-risking facilities, as well as policies and financial instruments to support private capital for investment in green and low carbon technologies,” Joshi said. There are recommendations for the analytical framework for sustainable development goal (SDG)-aligned finance, which will complement the G-20 Sustainable finance roadmap consisting of recommendations on nature-related data and reporting and social impact investment.

With regard to new technologies which could be used to mitigate the impact of climate change, Chandni Raina, Advsior in the Department of Economic Affairs, said there is a need to finance early-stage technologies, which are mainly developed by startups. “This is the time when (early stage climate) technology needs the resource at a concessional rate, at a rate that enables it to grow to the scale that we need. The discussion was on how do we do that because the normal instruments of mobilizing (funds) will not work,” she said. Stating that early stage climate technologies are housed in startups, Raina said there was a need for creating enabling frameworks to scale up the operations of startup and bring those technologies to the market.