NZAOA calls on policymakers to unlock $275trn in climate opportunities

September 6th, 2023

The Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance (NZAOA) has urged policymakers to overcome political barriers and open up $275 trillion in climate investment opportunities.

The group published a new discussion paper Unlocking Investment in Net Zero putting forward the economic case for transitioning to a 1.5°C scenario.

It estimated investment opportunities worth up to $275 trillion in tackling climate change in the run-up to 2050 and that opportunities geared towards asset owners could reach $20-31 trillion in the coming decades.

The group also emphasised the risks associated with failing to transition, including $4-6 trillion in losses per year by 2050.

While key decarbonisation technologies are already mature, cost effective and deployed at scale, there are still many political barriers to cutting emissions.

Barriers include a lack of public and private investment in infrastructure, such as grid upgrades and public chargers for electric vehicles, as well as uncertainties around less mature technologies such as carbon capture and storage.

The paper also presents a suite of policies that could remove current barriers and kick-start investments in net-zero technologies.

It encourages policymakers to increase financial support for decarbonisation solutions and reduce support for high-emitting technologies and introduce new mandatory regulation and technology standards to spur the adoption of green technologies.

Günther Thallinger, chair of NZAOA, said: “Asset owners have a huge role to play [in the climate transition], with potential contributions up to $31 trillion by 2050, but only by removing current investment barriers will we be able to unlock the full potential of private capital.”

Last month, the alliance called on companies and data providers to improve transparency, publishing a statement calling current sector-specific disclosures as “insufficient, unreliable, incomparable, or non-existent”.