Jennifer Layke Diretora Global do Programa de Energia do World Resources Institute, Washington
I
am humbled at this particular moment, to be at a crossroads that we hoped never to face, and yet, with climate change coming at us more dramatically and more quickly than many of us had feared, it is a moment for us to sit back and rethink our priorities, our models of growth and our economic development agenda. The science of climate change is ever more clear when we think about where we were two decades ago, a decade ago, and today. Our window of opportunity is narrowing very quickly. 2020 is a pivotal moment, and we never thought we would be here with an unprecedented collapse of our economies, an unprecedented global challenge to our health and our security, and looking now at how we build back, how we rethink our approach. I’m going to talk very briefly about three interlinked priorities that we need to focus on to address climate change and the risks that we face due to climate transformation. Those are: 1) around technology; 2) around policies, markets and institutions; 3) and around the re-examination of equity and the services that we provide for people and most vulnerable populations around the world. Technology is our good news story, as its costs and availability are transforming much more rapidly than we had predicted. Two decades ago, when I started my career working
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Conferência de Lisboa – 4 _ 2020 Lisbon Conference – 4
Global Director of the Energy Programme at the World Resources Institute, Washington
on renewable energy in 2000, we were looking at single units of photovoltaic (PV) cells on corporate facilities and homes, and the costs were prohibitive. Today, PV technology has dramatically increased in its capacity to generate electricity, and the cost has made it so much more available for most of the world’s population. In fact, many reports now show that about two-thirds of the globe could use renewable energy as cost-effectively, or more cost-competitively, than fossil technologies. However, electricity is not the only part of the energy sector that needs to be transformed. Transportation is equally important. Both electricity and the transportation fuels are systems that have entrenched interests, they have clear manufacturing or use of fuels that are already locked in today, and the question is: how do we change our technology use to enable us to make those shifts more quickly? Transportation has been a new good news story. We see electric vehicle (EV) technologies coming to scale much more rapidly than the analysts had predicted. In the past three years, EV sales have outstripped all expectations in the developed world. Personal passenger EV cars are coming on board very quickly, and range anxiety — how far do you need to go before you can charge again — is also becoming less of an issue for most consumers. In the pandemic, we also have to face the questions associated with where and how we think about public transpor-
A ACELERAÇÃO DAS MUDANÇAS GLOBAIS THE ACCELERATION OF GLOBAL CHANGE
