Tag: SWF

Should Sovereign Wealth Funds Invest to Achieve the Paris Agreement?

Almost all the government owners of sovereign wealth funds are signatories to the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Yet, despite this commitment, the world is not on course to meet these goals. This insufficient progress towards the Paris Agreement’s goals is partly explained by a lack of financing. International Energy Agency (IEA) research suggests that in a scenario consistent with limiting climate change to 2°C annual investment in low-carbon power would have to approximately double and annual investment in coal power plants sharply decline. There has been a significant effort by regulators and investors to better integrate climate change considerations into financial markets and ensure investment is consistent with the Paris Agreement’s goals. There are also several investor-led initiatives that have also recognised the importance of climate change.

The article available at the link below argues that sovereign wealth funds should be at the vanguard of these efforts by investors to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goals.

National seminar for Guyana “Managing Resources Post-Discovery”

Georgetown, Guyana, July 2017. Photo: Valerie Marcel

Significant oil fields have recently been discovered in Guyana. Their development would likely result in government revenues that are large compared with public spending, other domestic revenues and the economy. Large petroleum revenues, if wisely managed, can contribute to sustainable economic development. However, if poorly managed,they can retard economic development and create a ‘resource curse’. More specifically, they can lead to a loss of economic competitiveness, volatile and inefficient public spending,and unsustainable consumption. This is the summary of a workshop, held in Georgetown on 21–22 June 2017, that examined how petroleum development might influence Guyana’s development trajectory as well as the various mechanisms of saving petroleum revenues and rules for spending them. The seminar was hosted by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Natural Resources.

A summary of the workshop is available at the link below.