A significant opportunity has emerged as a result of the consensus reached in Paris at the twenty-first Conference of the Parties (COP 21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the end of last year and the world is now at an inflection point in the transition to cleaner energy generation.

The Paris Agreement, which 195 countries adopted in December after years of negotiations, aims to mitigate the increasing impact of climate change.

COP 21 is translating into policy development that is opening business opportunities and the path to the creation of the next generation of breakthroughs that will enable efforts to keep the global temperature rise to below 2 °C above preindustrial levels, US Department of Energy special adviser Kenneth Alston said on Tuesday.

Addressing delegates at the Power-Gen Africa conference, in Sandton, he noted that, as the impacts of climate change were increasingly seen across the world, the implementation of COP 21 and its attached ambitions became imperative.

“It is not whether the agreement is realistic . . . it is that we must start now,” he said, reiterating the importance of the Paris resolutions.

“We have a lot of work to do.”

Alston said there was a need to leverage public funds to catalyse private sector investment, particularly as the world would need investments of some $44-trillion by 2050 to unleash the clean-energy technologies needed to stay within the 2 °C targets.

Eskom executive for transmission Thava Govender added that the COP 21 objectives were realistic and achievable, but not without the political will to get things done.

However, he said South Africa had a huge task ahead of it to balance economic growth with emissions reduction.

“We need to get our emissions under control,” he said, pointing out that gas could play a flexible, complementary role to the much sought-after, but more rigid renewable-energy options within the country’s energy mix.

With South Africa’s emissions mostly stemming from coal-fired power generation, implementing 10 000 MW of gas as part of the planned energy mix could save South Africa some 11% of yearly carbon emissions.

Matleng Energy Solutions chairperson Nelisiwe Magubane noted that there was a lot of opportunity in climate change mitigation and the technology to deploy cleaner energy.

“In five years, Africa will show the world that it can and will deploy [cleaner energy technology],” she said.