ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, CMC — The head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Achim Steiner, says the shift to renewable energy should not result in developing countries, such as those in the Caribbean, becoming even more indebted to the rich nations that created the climate crisis in the first instance.

“If you want to achieve a world in which 1.5 degrees remains even remotely a possibility, we have to stop living in denial and assuming that some of the poorest countries that are already indebted and are facing a fiscal crisis after COVID-19 should now borrow even more money from the rich world in order to finance their accelerate the transition towards clean energy,” Steiner told journalists covering the 13th IRENA Assembly that ends here later on Sunday.

Caribbean countries and other small island developing states have been trying to convince the international community that containing global temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level is necessary to prevent worsening of already catastrophic impacts of climate change.

“Let us be clear, the world is nowhere near where it needs to be,” Steiner said, adding that many countries have advanced extraordinarily fast, proving that it is possible to provide 90 per cent of electricity on the national generation infrastructure from renewable sources.

“There is an irony in this expectation that I think needs to be challenged and not in the sense that we are just talking about transferring money from north to south,” he noted.

Steiner said the world needs to stop looking at the challenge of access to clean energy “as simply a lending operation where the poorest countries that have the greatest need to create access to electricity have to become borrowers”.

He urged that the issue be looked at from “a co-investment perspective,” adding that much of the UNDP’s current work is focusing on how to help countries “de-risk their investment environment” while working with the international financial system meaning — public and investors– to actually mobilise investments rather than just loans.

Steiner stated that otherwise, “the poorest people will have to use their tax revenues to repay the richest people in the world for compensating for something that they have had very little role in causing, but are now actually at the frontier of the impact”.

He said that rich and poor countries are partners in the transition to renewable energy.

“We are not competitors in this transition, and much of what the United Nations brings to this debate is hopefully the ability to unify governments, investors, companies, and technology providers, ultimately enabling us to still have a remote chance of staying within a 1.5-degree world,” he explained.

The UNDP administrator said that the reality is that currently there are 700 million people without access to electricity.

“And this is why we committed as UNDP to support 500 million people to gain access to clean and affordable energy in the coming four years,” Steiner said.

But he told reporters that the challenge for many developing countries “is not to tackle climate change as a free-standing problem, but rather to look at how their economy, how their society, how their financial system their energy systems can best, anticipate a world in which decarbonisation is unequivocally going to be the reality…”

He said this is “not magic” as there are countries that currently generate 70 to 90 per cent of their national electricity needs with renewables.

“It’s the product of something far more systematic, beginning with national leadership,” he said, adding that leadership from government, business and society is the one factor that explains why some countries have advanced quickly and others have been slower.

Steiner said the world should not allow “the narrative of concessional borrowing to mask the fact that the richer world will need to invest in the poorer world being able to pivot into a clean energy matrix not only because of decarbonisation but precisely because of development”.

He said that if poor people remain locked in an economy without access to electricity, “do not be surprised if at some point, the lights shining over the other side of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, are so bright when you sit in the dark of the night, that you will say as a young person, ‘I have no hope here. I have to go somewhere else.’”