Renewable Energy Development

Just Transition and Renewable Energy: A Business Brief

This business brief from the United Nations Global Compact outlines how your business can support public Just Transition policies. The authors acknowledge that business has a key role to play in ensures that the transition to the low carbon economy is just. The brief provides ten recommendations for how business can support the transition through their policy advocacy. This guidance will be most useful to your Government Affairs or Public Policy team.

Fossil Fuels in Transition: Committing to the phase-down of all fossil fuels

This in-depth, scenario-based report from the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) can help you understand what technologies and supporting policies are needed to decarbonise the global economy. It highlights the policies required to reduce fossil fuel demand; the role of different clean energy technologies in replacing fossil energy; and the role of carbon capture and removals. There is also a sectoral breakdown outlining where emissions reductions are most needed. This high-level overview of a global energy transition will be most useful to business leaders, strategy teams, and sustainability practitioners seeking to find out how their organisation fits in the global transition towards renewable energy development.

Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet

The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) is an alliance of philanthropy, local entrepreneurs, governments, and technology, policy, and financing partners that support a clean energy transition and ensuring universal energy access. They have produced a range of reports to support your understanding of key renewable energy topics, such as how the power system can be transformed in energy-poor countries and the job creation potential from a green power transition. Their flagship report, Powering People and the Planet, is a good resource for understanding the global challenge of ending energy poverty and the steps required to ensure a just energy transition.

The Clean Energy Buyers Institute (CEBI)

The Clean Energy Buyers Institute (CEBI) is a non-profit organisation that produces and curates resources that can help you understand innovative clean energy market solutions. Their resources include toolkits, explainers, and research on topics such as advancing grid decarbonisation and clean energy procurement. They have also curated a range of relevant resources. This platform will be most useful to Procurement, Operations, and Sustainability teams, or anyone responsible for energy purchasing.

Building Trust through an Equitable and Inclusive Energy Transition

This white paper from the World Economic Forum can help you understand why addressing the socioeconomic implications of the energy transition is essential for its viability. Divided into four parts, the paper outlines the complexities involved in advancing an equitable and inclusive energy transition; highlights the emerging signs of an unjust transition; identifies the underlying challenges of building trust and finding common ground between diverse stakeholders; and explores how regulations and effective capital mobilisation can enable workforce reskilling, distributed renewables development, and low-carbon innovation. These insights will be most useful to business leaders investing in the energy transition.

Strategies for Affordable and Fair Clean Energy Transitions

This comprehensive, evidence-based report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) offers a big-picture perspective on the costs, benefits, opportunities, and challenges of a rapid clean energy transition. The report explains how a clean energy future would be more affordable while also detailing the challenges that come with financing the transition at the level of government, households, and the private sector. It explores the policies needed to share the costs of the transition fairly, examines the risk of price shocks (drawing on historic examples and potential future risks), and provides guidance on how to safeguard against shocks that may compromise the affordability and fairness of the energy transition. These insights have important implications that will be most relevant to business leaders, strategy teams, and sustainability teams.

Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report, 2023

This comprehensive progress report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and other agencies can help you understand where progress has been made and where it is off track to meet the 2030 goal of SDG 7. The first five chapters review progress trends across key indicators (energy access, energy efficiency, renewable energy, clean cooking, and financial flows toward clean energy); chapter six provides a progress forecast for 2030 based on IEA’s policy scenarios; and chapter seven explains the data collection and methodological challenges related to each of the indicators. This resource will be most useful to sustainability practitioners interested in a statistical overview of global trends in energy and their alignment with international climate and development goals.

Just Transition Guide: Indigenous-led Pathways Toward Equitable Climate Solutions and Resiliency in the Climate Crisis

The global transition towards renewable energy is an important opportunity for Indigenous Communities to choose their own future. This resource from Sacred Earth Solar (SES) and others can help you understand how renewable energy projects can enable a Just Transition for Indigenous Communities. It explains the current challenges related to the Canadian energy and electricity systems and how they can be improved to support decentralised renewable energy projects. It showcases different pathways for developing community-based renewable energy systems such as solar, wind, small-scale hydro, and explains key considerations and learnings from communities that have already implemented them. This resource also explores other community solutions for a Just Transition, such as, food sovereignty, and reimagines how government policy can support these efforts. The lessons here will be most useful to sustainability and community relations teams whose organisations work with - or impact - Indigenous communities.

World Energy Outlook 2024

This annual report from the International Energy Agency can help you better understand trends in global energy use. Based on three long-term scenarios outlined, it explores how different energy futures might impact energy security, affordability, and sustainability. In all scenarios, human-caused emissions peak before 2030 and then decline at rates of 1%, 4%, and 15% per year. These trajectories lead to corresponding average temperature increases of 2.4 °C, 1.7 °C, and 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

It is important to note that these scenarios are based on many normative assumptions, and that warming is happening faster than expected; we have already exceeded 1.5 °C for more than a year. Further, these projections do not account for increasing natural emissions resulting from earth system destabilisation. That said, this report does offer useful macro-level considerations related to how geopolitical tensions, energy deployment, and electricity demand might affect the energy transition. While the full report is 398 pages long, we recommend strategy and sustainability practitioners review the executive summary.

Sustainable Power Policy Tracker

Banks have a major role to play in supporting power decarbonisation, either by directing financial flows to new sustainable power systems or ceasing financing of fossil fuel expansion and supporting phase-out. This tool can help you to better navigate the sustainable power policy landscape. Created to ensure the financial sector is adopting effective sustainable power policies to forcefully contribute to the 1.5°C climate goal, it tracks the commitments adopted by the top 60 banks worldwide regarding their support for sustainable power, including their targets for supporting sustainable power supply; for financing new sustainable power capacity; and for reporting on progress and other aspects.

Coal Policy Tracker

This tool can help you to better navigate the coal policy landscape. Created to ensure the financial sector is adopting effective coal policies to forcefully contribute to the 1.5°C climate goal, it assess over 500 institutes against seven criteria, including the exclusion of both new coal projects and the expansion of existing coal mines, plants, and infrastructure.

Oil & Gas Policy Tracker

This tool can help you to better navigate the oil and gas policy landscape. Created to ensure the financial sector is adopting effective oil and gas policies to forcefully contribute to the 1.5°C climate goal, it assess over 440 institutes against seven criteria, including the immediate exclusion of financial services dedicated to oil and gas projects as well as phase-out commitments.

Renewable energy certificates threaten the integrity of corporate science-based targets

This paper explains how the credibility of corporate science-based targets can be undermined by the use of renewable energy certificates (RECs). It outlines how the widespread use of RECs by companies have led to overestimates of mitigation impacts, and it argues that revised GHG accounting guidelines are needed to meet the 1.5 °C goal of the Paris agreement. The key findings of this paper will be most useful to sustainability practitioners, CSOs, and other executives involved in setting climate goals.

Site Renewables Right

This article by The Nature Conservancy introduces their Site Renewables Right Map. This interactive web map of the central United States combines more than 100 layers of engineering, land-use, and wildlife data to help you understand where wind and solar development will have a lower impact on wildlife. This information is intended to empower companies and communities to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy while protecting nature. This tool will be most useful to those involved in developing or procuring renewables energy, such as project development, engineering, procurement, and sustainability teams.

Building Benefit: Four steps to mitigate renewable energy’s environmental downsides

Although renewables are needed in growing numbers to meet climate goals, the environmental externalities associated with raw material extraction, manufacturing, and end-of-life disposal are likely to become more pronounced. This briefing from the ERM Institute identifies four steps that can limit the negative impacts of renewables growth on the environment and societies: opting for green production inputs and processes, introducing circular alternatives, minimising footprints, and considering wildlife from the start. The briefing identifies the benefits for taking action on each of these steps and provides practical solutions for achieving them.

Resourcing the Energy Transition: Principles to Guide Critical Energy Transition Minerals Towards Equity and Justice

The demand for critical minerals is set to nearly triple by 2030 as the world transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Yet, without proper management, the demand for critical minerals threatens to perpetuate commodity dependence, exacerbate geopolitical tensions and environmental and social challenges, and undermine efforts towards the energy transition. This guide from the Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals can help you to do your part to ensure the just and equitable management of sustainable, responsible, and reliable value chains for critical energy transition minerals. It highlights seven voluntary guiding principles for grounding the renewables transition in justice and equity, building on existing norms, commitments, and legal obligations outlined in UN texts. It also provides a number of actionable recommendations to help you embed and maintain these guiding principles across critical energy transition mineral value chains.

Playbook of Solutions To Mobilize Clean Energy Investment in the Global South

This resource from the World Economic Forum can help you understand how to unlock clean energy investments in emerging economies. It shows how common challenges in the Global South - such as lack of credit ratings or capital market depth - can be overcome. These solutions are laid out in the three sections: policy measures, finance mechanisms, and de-risking tools. There is also a large set of accompanying case studies highlighting where and how these tools have been applied. This practical tool will be most useful to investors and corporate finance teams.

Exploring shared prosperity: Indigenous leadership and partnerships for a just transition

This report from Indigenous Peoples Rights International (IPRI) and the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre can help you understand why the benefits of the energy transition must be shared with Indigenous Peoples around the world. The first section outlines the growing trend of benefit-sharing between business and Indigenous peoples in recent decades. It then explains the legal foundations for benefit-sharing, how it can create positive impact, and where it can go wrong. It also highlights co-ownership as an emerging model for benefit-sharing. The second section outlines the role of both government and companies in enabling the conditions for fair and equitable benefit-sharing. The third and final section offers project-level guidance on identifying and implementing benefit-sharing with a focus on equity co-ownership agreements. This resource will benefit professionals at any organisation whose activities affect the ancestral lands, territories, and resources of Indigenous Peoples, and will be widely applicable to project developers as well as sustainability, finance, legal, risk, and community relations teams.