Country Transition and Benchmarking is one of the challenges identified by the World Economic Forum Platform for Shaping the Future of Energy and Materials.

The world’s transition to secure, affordable, reliable and sustainable energy has been progressing, but the speed is not fast enough, and the progress is not consistent across countries and over time. Accelerating energy transition requires faster progress on all fronts, including research and deploying technology, investment, individual-level participation, and formulating and implementing effective policy. Given the scale and complexity of energy transition, and its interdependencies across different systems, no stakeholder group or organization can tackle this challenge alone.

Objective

This initiative aims to increase the speed of adoption of effective public policies and corporate decisions and to facilitate collaboration across energy ecosystem actors, by providing transparency and a robust fact base on progress on national and industrial transformation, and a platform for dialogue.

Projects

·       Energy transition index

The World Economic Forum publishes the annual "Energy Transition Index", which is a composite indicator providing a framework to benchmark and support countries in their energy transition efforts considering their current energy system performance, and the readiness of their macro-economic, social and regulatory environment for energy transition. The index benchmarks 115 countries across 38 indicators. The index is now in it's 11th edition, and has informed decision-makers for more than a decade on the efficacy of energy policies for an robust and effective energy transition, and best practices from peer-economies across the globe. The next edition will be published in April 2022.

·       Global Energy Transition Dialogue Series

As part of this workstream, the Forum is leading a global series of country-focused roundtables on the transformational imperatives and roadmaps of national energy, industrial and infrastructure systems at the minister and chief executive level and in collaboration with key local decision-makers from the public and private sectors. The primary objective of the dialogue series is to support economies in shaping the transformation of their energy, industrial and infrastructure systems to achieve continued economic growth, aligned with net-zero emission targets, while balancing the imperatives of shared prosperity and social justice. The dialogues are organized in close collaboration with local stakeholders, to secure alignment with country-specific agendas and current policy priorities.

Countries where energy roundtables were organized in the past year include Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, China, Pakistan, Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, Ukraine and Namibia.

·       Industry Net-zero Transformation Tracker

Heavy industries and long-distance transport, which account for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions are considered "harder to abate" sectors due to the limited range of mature and commercially viable solutions that can help decarbonize processes and outputs of these sectors at scale. Mitigating emissions from these sectors will require coordinated mobilization of technologies, finance, enabling infrastructure, and targeted policy interventions, as well as robust and ambitious commitments to net zero emissions roadmaps. 

This initiative attempt to track the progress of heavy industry sectors to net-zero, by proposing a general purpose framework to monitor sector-wide emissions, and the evolution of enabling environment across technology, capital, policies, infrastructure, and demand. The first edition of the tracker will be published in May 2022.