IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol spoke to world leaders at the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, about the rapid global deployment of clean energy and the need to accelerate the path to net zero emissions.
The G7 Summit was presided over by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida as part of Japan’s G7 presidency in 2023, and it was attended by leaders from the G7 as well as Australia, Brazil, Comoros, the current Chair of the African Union, the Cook Islands, the current Chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Korea, India, the current Chair of the G20, Indonesia, the current Chair of ASEAN, and Vietnam. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky also attended the session on Sunday.
Dr Birol presented the IEA’s newest assessment of global energy markets to leaders during a session on energy, climate, and the environment on Saturday, noting that the clean energy economy is rising far quicker than many people thought. He then went on to examine the steps that must be taken to guarantee that the geopolitically driven energy security issues associated with oil and gas, which have been a feature of the global energy landscape since the 1970s, do not reoccur in the case of clean energy.
The IEA was referred to in the G7 leaders’ communiqué and an accompanying Clean Energy Economy Action Plan, both in terms of existing work and requests for new analysis and activities, such as critical minerals, clean energy technology manufacturing, renewables, innovation, and reducing emissions from the power and road transportation sectors.
According to the IEA, it had previously supplied analyses in several crucial areas to this year’s G7 Presidency’s energy and climate agenda before the Ministerial-level conference in Sapporo in April and was widely mentioned in the ministers’ communiqué. The IEA published a new study for the Hiroshima Summit, analysing the most recent advancements in global clean energy technology production.
During the G7 Summit, Dr Birol held bilateral talks with several of the leaders in attendance, including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
