C-2: Role of Regional Cooperation for Asia-Pacific’s Energy Transition in the COVID-19 Era
- Regional cooperation, whether it is South-South cooperation, North-South cooperation
should be the order of the day in areas like innovation, technology transfer, capacity
building and knowledge sharing on issues like water, food, and energy.
- A stakeholder-centric approach with private sector engagement will help Pakistan to
build back better.
- As a long-term plan, Pakistan must diversify its supply chains, develop local industries,
provide finance and promote supplier development programmes and industry clusters.
- Enhanced climate-energy policies will enable cleaner energy transition. The government
should strengthen international energy and climate plans in ways that complement
existing initiatives, support multilateral efforts to facilitate and enable National
Determined Contribution (NDC) implementation, increase collaboration between experts
across priority countries and share relevant global expertise.
- Enhance and build upon the existing analytically rigorous evidence base for policy
action, via statistics, indicators, and improved capabilities for data analysis.
- Create more effective knowledge and information sharing and create capacity to enable
stronger policy action and alignment of investment flows, including via country-specific
reviews of policies, supported by scenario modelling where relevant.
- For the region as a whole, the focus also needs to be on raising climate ambition,
safeguarding ecosystem health, clean air for all, and cities for a sustainable future.
- innovative solutions can be harnessed to address the climate crisis through more
ambitious mitigation pathways such as increasing energy efficiency of industry and cities
by 60-70%; decarbonization of electricity; deep reductions in agricultural emissions; and
advancing carbon capture, carbon storage and sequestration measures.
- There is a need to enhance synergies in development and planning and implement key
energy projects, as well promote the coordination of policies and mechanisms within
governments of the Asia Pacific region.
- South Asia, in particular, should transition towards cleaner energy and fossil fuel plants
should be replaced with clean energy demands. At the same time, job losses in fossil fuel/
conventional energy sector have to be tackled with job creation in the clean energy
sector.
- Focus on climate action will be beneficial because climate action and COVID-19
recovery are integrated steps of mitigation.
- To improve carbon pricing in LMICs (Low to Middle Income Countries), there is a need
to protect vulnerable groups of society for revenue recycling during the process.
- There is a need for international support, regional cooperation and additional policies to
increase the political and societal support for clean energy transition.
- More policy analysis and guidance are required on COVID-19 green recovery, e.g the
UNESCAP Framework for socioeconomic response could be helpful in this context.
- There is a need to enhance cooperation for Paris Agreement NDCs and link recovery
investments to climate action and this could be done by sharing experiences.
- There is a need to reinvigorate commitments and mutual support for universal access to
energy during COVID-19.
- New energy frameworks for energy security and energy resilience are required, especially
for pandemics crises.
- There is a need to have regional conversations on how we can reduce our shared
vulnerabilities to energy shocks.
- Success stories of net metering, hydro projects, electrical grid stabilities, solar and wind
projects could be replicated in the region from India, Nepal, Bhutan and Pakistan to
ensure energy transition.
- Public private partnership in the clean energy sector could be used to enhance regional
cooperation for energy transition.
