#COP21: Institutional Investors Group On Draft Agreement

Responding to the COP21 negotiating text issued late on Thursday 10 December, Stephanie Pfeifer, CEO of IIGCC, a network of 120 institutional investors with over EUR13trn in assets under management said today: “Institutional investors are cautiously optimistic about the climate agreement now emerging in Paris. The next few hours will be critical.

“We recognise this latest text is a careful attempt to balance issues by many different parties and welcome the progress made in many areas. In particular we welcome the strong policy signal given in the form of a clear long term goal that encompasses both temperature and an ambition to achieve climate neutrality in the second half of this century.

“Investors came to Paris to showcase their many actions on climate risk and to call for a clear long term policy signal sufficient to accelerate the pace and scale of investment in all aspects of a cleaner low carbon energy system. IIGCC believes this draft agreement – in tandem with the national polices that flow from it – could unleash the investment required to rise to the climate challenge.

“With that in mind institutional investors welcome the long-term low-emissions development strategies embedded in this latest text.  We strongly support this voluntary provision since the development of these strategies will by definition give investors confidence about trajectories at a country by country levels and hope world governments will retain them in the final agreement.

“Under the INDC regime many countries have already recognised the opportunities available to them in the low carbon transition. Investors therefore welcome the provisions that will prevent backsliding and believe many countries will in practice use the suggested five year updating process text to raise their ambition and drive the kind of national core energy and transport infrastructure policies required to ensure over time that humanity can bend the emissions curve well below a 2 degree pathway.

“As part of the immense and diverse coalition of non-state actors assembled in Paris, the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change calls on all Parties to take bold steps as negotiations approach the finishing line in order to deliver a new and historic global agreement that we can then help mobilise the finance required to implement.”