On October 7, CEBDS held the Brazilian round of the LCTPi (Low Carbon Technology Partnerships Initiative) in São Paulo. The initiative is a joint effort by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which aims to promote public-private partnerships to accelerate the development of low-carbon technologies at a level and speed that is consistent with the goal of limiting global warming to less than 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels.

Next month, a new global climate agreement will be negotiated at the 21st Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris, which will mark a key moment in shaping the post-2020 climate regime. The role of technology and innovation in the quest to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is critical to achieving international targets, and government support for technological change is crucial to remove current barriers and scale up business solutions.

LCTPi emerges as a solution and acts as a platform, bringing together all key stakeholders – business associations, individual companies, governments, international organizations, experts and academia, public and private investors – for dialogue and agreement on the concrete measures needed to accelerate low-carbon technological innovations, scale up and disseminate solutions.

In order to be able to arrive in Paris with concrete results, it was decided to restrict priority technology areas for the initial phase of this initiative. In Brazil, the technologies that will be worked on are: Renewables, Advanced Biofuels, Materials (cement), Forests and Agriculture.

At the meeting, Action Plans were approved for each technology, which identify the ambition of each theme (vision of success) and the specific actions to be taken by each party to achieve the identified objectives.