Gauging the costs for clean energy transition

Efforts to mitigate climate change have largely focused on the shift away from fossil fuels in energy production. As a result, most climate-finance assessments have studied the costs of such a transition and determined that large investments are required to deploy cleaner sources of power.

But in a new working paper, we found that shifting the energy sector to renewables is relatively affordable for emerging-market economies (EMEs) in the G20. Our study measures the climate-finance needs from 2022 to 2030 of Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the power, road transport, cement, and steel sectors, which account for about half of such emissions in these nine EMEs.

For starters, we found that the clean-en