More than 65 million people have no access to electricity, 60 million more in the Middle East and North Africa endure prolonged outages and under-supply. Seven hundred million Africans are challenged by energy poverty. Increasing demand for energy along with the need for climate solutions leads to the concept of a bridge of innovation to solve these regional challenges simultaneously. Lacking a one-size-fits-all solution, we must trace convergent transition pathways to help capital and tech deployment achieve regional energy transitions to a low-carbon economy.

• What technology and industrial policies and investment portfolios will keep economic growth alive by meeting growing energy demand during this climate and energy transition, while solving emission reductions?

• How to advance solutions to these transitions needs? What targeted technologies must be commercialized to achieve them?

• How can the untapped demand to catalyze new technology deployment of food-energy-water systems enable sustainable regional development and enhance inter-regional trade and commerce?

• What would be the optimal energy transition portfolio to maximize renewable energy storage as well as carbon sequestration and storage in order to engineer new solutions sets that could finance energy transition to meet carbon-reduction needs?

• How can transition bonds, green bonds, and sustainability and sustainability-linked bonds contribute to accelerating capital deployment toward climate/energy transition targets?

• How can short-term intensification of natural resource development fuel regional transitions and new technologies for sustainability, and meet energy demand in developing markets?

• How can we accelerate lower carbon natural resource extraction and recycle revenues to deploy capital to next-stage EnergyTech solutions? Can hard abatement industries become the accelerant for transition to 21st century transformative renewable and carbon removal energy technologies reducing emissions?

• What role can regional sovereign wealth funds play to catalyze investments with the aim of tapping markets regionally and globally for the next generation of technologies at the food-energy-water nexus?

Moderator

Glenn Yago
Senior Fellow, Milken Institute

Speakers

Bashar Al Natoor
Global Head of Islamic Finance, Fitch Ratings

Nili Gilbert
Vice Chairwoman, Carbon Direct

Samer Haj-Yehia
Chairman, Bank Leumi

Jon Medved
CEO, OurCrowd

Hiromichi Mizuno
Special Envoy of U.N. Secretary-General on Innovative Finance and Sustainable Investments