Executive Director meets with UN Secretary-General to discuss climate change and clean energy financing

IEA Executive Director Faith Birol had a bilateral meeting with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in New York today that covered global efforts to tackle the climate crisis, including the urgent need to improve conditions for clean energy financing in emerging economies.

They discussed the global stocktake, an exercise to measure country progress in meeting national climate commitments in line with the Paris Agreement targets, which is a key part of the COP28 Climate Change Conference. Dr Birol said that the IEA stands ready to support the United Nations in the global stocktake process ahead of COP28 in Abu Dhabi later this year.

They also discussed the IEA’s expanding work on making sure that countries’ clean energy transitions are people-centred. This includes providing data and analysis to help governments understand which areas in the labour market face shortages or where retraining is required to ensure people and communities thrive as part of the transition. He also noted the role that the IEA is playing in the Just Energy Transition Partnership that Indonesia and a group of leading economies launched at the G20 Leaders Summit in Bali in November.