With COP26 just around the corner in November, there is a lot of talk about the need for ‘transformational’ approaches to combat climate change. The window to reduce global emissions to manageable levels is rapidly closing, which means that efforts to do so must become more ambitious and wide-ranging to be effective in time.
For the Middle East, innovation and investment around renewables has ramped up partly in response to this global environmental need, and partly because it is an economic necessity. The ‘double crisis’ of oil price shocks of recent years, plus the massive decline in global energy demand during the pandemic (a 4% drop – the biggest since World War 2), have proven beyond a doubt that tying an economy to a resource prone to price fluctuations makes it vulnerable. In 2021, we are now seeing how the region’s transition towards renewables has gone beyond the experimentation phase, and has become transformational.