Governments and companies will need to invest at least US$92 trillion by 2050 in order to cut emissions fast enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change.
That’s the latest forecast from analysts at BloombergNEF, who see that scale of spending as necessary to drive a rapid electrification of the global economy and slash reliance on fossil fuels.
Thirty years is a short timeframe to achieve the scale of transformation that is needed to limit further dangerous increases in global temperatures. Investment in infrastructure to accommodate energy transition will need to rise to between US$3.1 trillion and US$5.8 trillion annually on average until 2050, up from about US$1.7 trillion in 2020, BNEF found. That means the final bill could be as much as US$173 trillion, about eight times the US GDP in 2019.
