Previous Forum — 2021

Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, UAE’s minister of industry and advanced technology, joined Suhail Al Mazrouei, the UAE minister of energy and infrastructure, and Musabbeh Al Kaabi, the CEO of UAE investments at the Mubadala Investment Company.

“Real friends say the bitter truth,” said Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Forum. And “the bitter truth is that real energy transitions are coming, and they are coming fast.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping made a pledge to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. Can China live up to the promises?

Each crisis represents a major US foreign-policy challenge, but all may receive less attention from the new American administration than another pressing issue in the region: Iran’s recent nuclear advances.

Joe Biden’s inaugural address was a call for unity—and also resilience. What did the speech signal about where his presidency is headed? Here’s key takeaways from five leading experts on international affairs.

Oil and gas will still play a crucial role in the world’s economy even as clean-energy “electrostates” rise in prominence, and Biden will prioritize the threat of climate change like no president has before him.

COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland—delayed until November 2021—is more likely to produce significant results now that US President Joe Biden occupies the White House, said a group of experts meeting virtually the day after Biden’s inauguration.

Fighting climate change should not become a partisan issue, said US Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware who co-chairs the fourteen-member Bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus.

BP, the world’s fourth-largest energy conglomerate, and Bank of America, the world’s ninth-largest bank are among the companies endorsing a charter likened to a recovery plan for the planet. Dubbed the Terra Carta, the charter commits them to working toward goals related to meeting global net-zero emissions targets by 2050.

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated “the most severe crisis for aviation ever,” said Marc Hamy, vice president of corporate affairs, sustainability, and environment at Airbus. But there’s another crisis on the horizon for the aviation industry: “increasing pressure coming from climate change. So we absolutely need to recover from this crisis in aviation, and at the same time we’ll have to manage the most important transition in the history of our sector: decarbonized aviation.” Hamy added.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed an “interdependent” world with “huge issues of inequity,” said Sunita Narain, director general of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). Without addressing these realities, “we cannot deal with the virus, and it’s the same with climate change.”