The world’s least developed countries rely on external sources for almost three-quarters of their energy investment but may pay up to seven times more than developed countries to access international capital markets, which is a major impediment to ramping up investments in renewables, United Nations secretary-general António Guterres says. With the release of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (Unctad’s) ‘World Investment Report 2023’, on July 5, he has called for a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) stimulus, among other things, to increase long-term and affordable financing for developing countries “to enable them to invest at scale in the transition to renewable energy”.
