Achieving the renewable pledges of COP26

The attention paid to this year’s COP26 conference seems to be much more widespread than for any previous global climate conference. Much of my personal academic background has heavily focused on sustainability, and it is remarkable and encouraging to see the dramatic increase in consumer awareness in the years since I began my studies. Organized protests, school strikes, and social media trends are having a growing impact on making policy makers listen up and react. Yet it’s important to see things through a critical lens; it’s not always viable to change policies, take action and achieve environmental goals if the underlying technical and economic infrastructure doesn’t allow for it.

Without a functioning infrastructure, near enough every bold target towards sustainability would be practically unachievable. Think of your day-to-day recycling habits; you might cook a meal and ensure that you put plastic waste in one container, food waste in a second and metal in a third. You invest your time and space into making these conscious efforts. Yet these efforts are only valuable because when the waste management company collect your waste, they have the facilities to process all this waste separately and ensure they are processed for recycling.

The same can be said for renewable energy. At COP26, over 40 countries signed a commitment to scale up renewable power generation and transition away from fossil fuel- based power sources. The transition would not be possible without new clean technical solutions as well as economic instruments supporting their development and uptake globally. Otherwise, these pledges are just empty words.

Earlier this year, our CEO Markus discussed about the coming-of-age of GOs, from their wobbly first steps through a difficult path to stability and growth. The 26-year-old COP-infrastructure is likewise now in adulthood and is one of the most crucial platforms to ensure a healthy pension age for our globe.

By developing the GO system to new heights in the years to come, we are proud to be a piece of solving the climate crisis puzzle, assembled further in the yearly COP meetings. Guarantees of Origin (GOs) play a vital part in this equation. They engage energy consuming companies and people in the energy transition by giving them a choice to purchase the energy they prefer.

As demonstrated by the social movement around big conferences and climate change in general, consumer choices, such as choice of energy source, are important. It is important that we consumers are not only able to discuss sustainable choices, but actively make sustainable choices too. This also makes the previously highlighted underlying technical and economic infrastructure increasingly important. We need to be able to trust that the good choices we try to make have the impact we intended. If we choose renewable, we need to know that we get renewable. This is what the GO-system enables, and is what ties it to the bigger picture of green transition on a very practical level. The GO system ensures that making sustainable choices is transparent, understandable and reliable. As such, it plays an important role in fulfilling the commitments made in COP26.