Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to HSBC Global Viewpoint, the podcast series that brings together business leaders and industry experts to explore the latest global insights, trends, and opportunities.
Speaker: Make sure you're subscribed to stay up to date with new episodes.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: And now onto today's show.
Speaker: Welcome everyone.
Speaker: I'm delighted to talk today about financing the transition, presenting you with key outcomes and key expectations ahead of COP27 and COP28 coming from the Middle East.
Speaker: So today we're really going to dig into some of the concepts that business is thinking about and talking about in terms of financing the transition.
Speaker: I'm delighted to welcome four fellow panellists,
Speaker: distinguished in their corporate and in this topic to hear their insights around what they're doing in terms of their corporate strategy, how they're financing it, and really what they're thinking about in terms of regulatory drivers.
Speaker: First, I'd like to welcome May Abdelhaim, who is president for GE based out of Cairo, so for Egypt.
Speaker: Welcome.
Speaker: Christian, who is part of the team at AHA Horizons.
Speaker: Dieter Volkamer, who we welcome from Siemens Energy.
Speaker: And Greg Feuer, who is the CFO of ALDA, the real estate company here in Dubai.
Speaker: So thank you for joining me.
Speaker: And I'm going to kick off the conversation by talking straight with you, May, and looking at GE.
Speaker: So we've had the pleasure of working with GE on numerous occasions.
Speaker: And you're a true solutions provider for the energy transition.
Speaker: Can you tell us a little bit more about how your products fit into the transition story and what you're working on?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Thank you, Zoe.
Speaker: So at GE, we believe that climate change is an urgent global priority.
Speaker: And we are taking serious actions to address it.
Speaker: We set our emission goals for 2020 and met them ahead of schedule.
Speaker: And now we have also set goals for being carbon neutral in our own operations.
Speaker: Given that one third of the world's electricity is generated by GE equipment and almost 90% of the world's transmission utilities are equipped with GE technologies, we are focused on playing an essential role in the global energy transition.
Speaker: So we believe that cleaner energy future will be achieved through a combination of lowering emissions today and innovating in breakthrough technologies for the future.
Speaker: We are working with our customers and partners to prioritize a decade of action to lower emissions near term while securing a path to lower carbon future.
Speaker: And we are doing this through growing renewables by accelerating the expanded deployment of renewable energy infrastructure, as we are a renewable energy company, and through leveraging gas power as a force multiplier to help accelerate decarbonization in the near term with more efficient technologies.
Speaker: For example, coal to gas switching is such a good one.
Speaker: Also through modernizing the grid, through modernizing both physical assets and digitizing the grid, we can help make it more resilient and capable of transmission from diverse sources of power generation, such as renewable energy.
Speaker: And on the innovation side, we are working on multiple technologies, including hydrogen, carbon capture, utilization and storage, superconducting generator technology, small modular reactors and sustainable aviation fuels, to name a few.
Speaker: We have implemented solutions in all of these areas around the world.
Speaker: Look at the SAF blend, the head flight from London to Abu Dhabi last year, for example, or the small nuclear reactor technology that we will be deploying in Ontario, Canada.
Speaker: These are just a few of the examples we have of solutions that are already out there in the world working
Speaker: toward the energy transition.
Speaker: It will not be one solution or one approach.
Speaker: It will take a diverse array of technologies, solutions, and players to move the needle on the energy transition.
Speaker: It's a really important area and I'm so interested to hear about the sustainable aviation fuel part.
Speaker: It's something that is really close to my heart.
Speaker: Being here in Dubai, but traveling everywhere to go and visit family back in the UK, etc.
Speaker: We really want to know that we're doing this on a sustainable basis.
Speaker: So GE central to the transformation.
Speaker: And we'll come back to some of those themes.
Speaker: So moving now on to Siemens Energy, Dieter.
Speaker: So you've been working on this for a while.
Speaker: Tell us a little bit more about your approach to ESG and transition and how it's been developed into a successful growth strategy.
Speaker: Because I think that's what our audience wants to hear about.
Speaker: It's how to generate a successful roadmap on the sustainability agenda.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks, Zoe.
Speaker: Before I come closer to your question, maybe it's worthwhile to spend a couple of seconds on what is Siemens Energy, actually, because, I mean, Siemens, everybody knows Siemens, but maybe not everybody knows that Siemens Energy is a startup, more or less.
Speaker: I mean, we operate in 90 countries.
Speaker: We have a revenue of roughly...
Speaker: So it's a larger startup, but it's founded via a spin-off in 2020 from the Siemens Energy.
Speaker: And since then, we are independent company stock listed Energy Pure Place.
Speaker: And having said this, I mean, we had a very good foundation when we started our sustainability journey, having the legacy from Siemens and some of the targets
Speaker: we directly copied, to be very honest.
Speaker: I mean, for example, becoming climate neutral in our own operation, that was already invented or started by Siemens in 2015.
Speaker: And we clearly said we will continue this path.
Speaker: On the other hand, it was also clear that we need to understand what is the requirements in terms of sustainability for energy pure play.
Speaker: So we went through a lot of discussions and honestly, it was very fruitful to discuss also with the finance industry.
Speaker: And we had a lot of contacts during the phase of the cough out to really understand what will investors in the future seek for in terms of ESG program, but also in terms of ESG performance indicators.
Speaker: So that helped us a lot to understand where we need to target at.
Speaker: And in the end, we came out with a very comprehensive sustainability program focusing on responsible operations on the one hand.
Speaker: So how are we doing business with elements of
Speaker: health and safety, of course, diversity is super important.
Speaker: And also given the fact, this is only a few examples, but also given the fact that we are in huge infrastructure projects, also the topic of human rights compliance are very important.
Speaker: But given our portfolio, and we cover the entire value chain with conventional power, renewable power, transmission, also hydrogen businesses in our portfolio and the decarbonization of industries.
Speaker: And we said we need to come up with ambitious targets and they need to be approved and we choose SPTI, the science based target initiative, and we choose the science based target initiative.
Speaker: And we also have a lot of the data that we have in the future.
Speaker: who approved our decarbonization targets being in line with Paris.
Speaker: And this is, I think, a very important sign.
Speaker: And it helped us also to integrate decarbonization clearly into our company strategy.
Speaker: And this is, I think CO2 is a kind of a business indicator.
Speaker: Like we have revenue, like we have EBIT and profit.
Speaker: Also we discuss about CO2 in our projects.
Speaker: This is very helpful.
Speaker: And I can name a couple of projects which clearly show that this is super important also for the Middle East region, for Egypt, where we, for example, with our daughter Siemens Gamesa, we are helping Egypt with a large project
Speaker: on their ambition to become a renewable energy hub for Africa.
Speaker: And this is closely connected with a memorandum of understanding which we signed with the Egyptian Electricity Holding Company who want to be, who want to develop a hydrogen based industry and also in the end export green hydrogen, which I think is also an excellent element because I mean hydrogen everybody sees it as one of the major fuels in the future.
Speaker: And you're mentioning the aviation industry, I think hydrogen
Speaker: will play also a huge role here via e-fuels and last but not least we are closely working with the ARENA with the International Renewable Energy Agency in Abu Dhabi also here to jointly focus on the energy transition based on renewables and drive the energy transition so as said sustainability decarbonisation clearly part of our company strategy that's great thank you for running us through but now moving on to Greg so Greg
Speaker: You're both the chief financial officer and the chief sustainability officer of ALDAR.
Speaker: And you're in a different sector from GE and Siemens.
Speaker: Can you just tell us a little bit about your view on transition and how that's being implemented throughout the organization?
Speaker: Thank you Zoe, pleasure to be here.
Speaker: So for ALDAR, and maybe just the first bit on who ALDAR is for the people that aren't aware on the call.
Speaker: Aldar is a large master developer based in Abu Dhabi.
Speaker: We have about $15 billion of real estate.
Speaker: We have a market cap of about $10 billion.
Speaker: We're a master developer.
Speaker: And in our country, which is only 50 years old, the real estate sector is very young.
Speaker: and companies like us in Aldar and Abu Dhabi, like EMR in Dubai and other places, government-linked entities were invented to help the city build itself.
Speaker: So over our 15 years of existence, we've probably had a hand in building about 15 to 20% of our entire city-state, and we have 65 million square meters of land, which means we have another 50 years to go.
Speaker: So people like us sit at the top of the real estate food chain and operate from a leadership perspective in our market.
Speaker: So when it comes to sustainability and ESG and the energy transition, our strategy at Aldar has been simply to lead.
Speaker: And that perspective really came from this market leading incumbency, this market position that we have.
Speaker: We build about 80% of all new off-plant homes in Abu Dhabi.
Speaker: When you're that large and this issue matters so much, you really need to take it seriously and you need to take a leadership position.
Speaker: For us, that has meant having advocacy, not just at the board, but at the chief executive who owns this topic by definition, but also that chief level
Speaker: advocates for it so I became actually for a couple of days I became the chief sustainability officer of Aldar and at one point our organizational structure actually had the CFO reporting into the office of sustainability.
Speaker: We decided not to brand it as such at that time because we thought maybe the market wasn't ready yet to have a public listed company without a CFO but just to give you a perspective of how we lead and how we manage
Speaker: We view sustainability to be that thing that ensures we are future-proofed and sort of around forever.
Speaker: But it needed top-level support before it had real grassroots engagement and we were ensuring that the culture of sustainability was built within the organization.
Speaker: We've really taken that leadership position seriously and are keen to move our supply chain forward really with the decisiveness and with the leadership that a top of the food chain industry
Speaker: actor like ourselves has to do and progress for us means engaging with the supply chain as a developer we own land and have a brand and have capital and everything else in between turning sand into land into a home that someone takes over is the supply chain
Speaker: And the supply chain needs a lot of conditioning and a lot of work and without proactive engagement from people like us to trial technologies to lobby regulators to ensure that suppliers know that there is offtake and that there is a keen, you know, top of the food chain developer willing to cure on a green sustainable basis.
Speaker: you won't move your industry forward.
Speaker: And I think that's a similar kind of perspective that should also exist with other top of the food chain, animals, auto assemblers, airlines, people like that.
Speaker: You're absolutely right.
Speaker: And there are several issues coming out from your comments that really kind of resonate with us at HSBC as well.
Speaker: One is, you know, taking the agenda seriously here on transition without taking it seriously and having a very top level governance and perspective on how these things are going to play out.
Speaker: You can't adjust your business model in order to embrace them and to embrace the opportunity that they present.
Speaker: And similarly,
Speaker: this point around the supply chain, you know, there is so much engagement activity to be done in the supply chain to help move the agenda forward quite fast.
Speaker: And so delighted to hear that you're working on that topic in particular.
Speaker: So brilliant.
Speaker: Moving on to Christian.
Speaker: Christian, you know, you've heard about some of the approaches from fellow panellists
Speaker: Net zero is clearly important in terms of the business opportunity for you, but equally how you partner with your clients and how you partner throughout your value chain.
Speaker: How is your approach going?
Speaker: differing or similar to Siemens GE and Alder.
Speaker: Can you just tell us a little bit about what you're up to?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So just a bit of background.
Speaker: AQUA Horizons was set up in 2020 as the broader AQUA group's spearhead on tackling climate change.
Speaker: We develop and invest in technologies projects
Speaker: industries.
Speaker: Today we have three main pillars of decarbonization, renewable energy, hydrogen and carbon capture.
Speaker: We also have a fairly broad mandate to widen that to new areas.
Speaker: Some said that we had an unfair competitive advantage compared to other smaller startups by being a part of the larger industrial group.
Speaker: And being part of the ACA group provides us with technology, competence, and not least capital.
Speaker: The engineering capabilities found within ACA solutions and the industrial digitalization expertise in the group is key for commercializing technology and bringing down cost, which is crucial for a successful energy transition.
Speaker: The ACA group also provides us with a global network of industrial partners.
Speaker: And working in partnerships is one of the key levers for us to generate value.
Speaker: Through the aqua groups ecosystem, we have access to leading industrial actors across the segments we operate in, such as our partnership with Shell and Statcraft on hydrogen, BP and ocean winds on offshore wind, and Siemens Energy on carbon capture and storage.
Speaker: Our business model is set up so that we look for partners across the value chain from securing renewable energy feedstock for our projects to partnering with developers on the actual industrial project and partnering with industry majors on offtake.
Speaker: This gives us access to attractively priced feedstock, industrial and strategic expertise and new markets as well as long-term capital.
Speaker: Partnering is something that is really coming out quite significantly through the rest of this, the conversations that we're having.
Speaker: It seems like for those of us that have been working on climate for a while, we know that we know that the pure play solution of scaling up renewable capacity to be able to provide that supply side part of the energy system.
Speaker: But the demand side part that needs to move in harmony to be able to get emissions down
Speaker: is has has different solutions in terms of hard to abate sectors what you can actually do ie you can't just use renewable power some of the time you need to sort of think about how you shift your business model a bit but equally you need the incentives to to be able to commercialize the available technology and this partnership idea
Speaker: is really mission critical to be able to get those markets moving fast.
Speaker: So I'm glad that you've brought up the concept in our conversation today.
Speaker: You know, we've touched on this a little bit in terms of the thematics that are important for transition, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, and a little bit about how we make that work.
Speaker: But I'm really keen to dig into some tangible ideas now, especially with Egypt hosting COP27.
Speaker: May, I'm guessing that it's getting busy for GE in terms of your conversations with the Egyptian government and others.
Speaker: Tell us a little bit more about some projects that are going on.
Speaker: So actually, we have been in the region since the early 1930s.
Speaker: And since then, we have served as a strong global partner, providing innovative solutions to our customers across the whole Middle East and Africa.
Speaker: And with COP27 fast approaching, we recognize the opportunity we have by working toward implementation.
Speaker: And we are already
Speaker: supporting our partners in the region around the world to realize net zero ambitions.
Speaker: For example, in Egypt, where all the action is taking place later this year, GE Digital in partnership with Bakhtel, Baker Hughes, MB Petrojet, HSBC, and the National Bank of Egypt signed an MOU to support the decarbonization of downstream facilities in Egypt.
Speaker: So this collaborative initiative seeks to lower emissions across critical industries like the oil and gas industry, which will be key to realizing Egypt's vision for decarbonization.
Speaker: So GE is bringing software solutions to this coalition of partners.
Speaker: GE Gas Power also has signed two agreements with the Egyptian electricity holding company.
Speaker: to promote efforts for decarbonizing the electricity sector in Egypt.
Speaker: And that's zooming into Egypt, but broadly in Abu Dhabi, for example, GE is already developing roadmaps for decarbonization with partners like Emirates Global Animalian and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, ADMA.
Speaker: So we are looking at hydrogen and carbon capture, utilization and storage and other solution.
Speaker: We also support Egypt across the healthcare and aviation sectors, providing solutions for patients and passengers across other critical industries.
Speaker: Of course, looking ahead to COP27, there will be a lot that will unfold.
Speaker: And as a head of GE's global COP27 team, I'm on the ground in Cairo and I'm so excited about the progress I see ahead of the November event.
Speaker: It's really interesting to see how governments and companies are collaborating for the greater groups.
Speaker: I also really appreciate the emphasis this COP has on implementation, something, of course, GE is passionate about as well.
Speaker: So the whole event will be focused on a just and ambitious plan for the energy transition, one that looks at sustainability, reliability, and affordability.
Speaker: We call this the energy trilemma and we believe that all three must be balanced as we work toward solutions as one global community and particularly for the 750 million people without access to power.
Speaker: And we believe that it will take much more than one company, one government or entity to succeed with these goals.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: It's really exciting that COP is almost here.
Speaker: But equally, having been through the COP process sort of several times and worked alongside the UN since before Paris back in 2015, there's always a kind of a year of excitement, but equally a year of rollercoaster sentiment as work plans come together and as the collaborative approach takes shape.
Speaker: And it really does then kind of have a crescendo at the COP event itself.
Speaker: So we're looking forward to seeing that.
Speaker: And you're right in that implementation is really the name of the game right now, right?
Speaker: Which is why we wanted to have corporates like yourselves discussing what you're up to because...
Speaker: I think our investor community and fellow corporates want to learn because the partnership element and the radical collaboration bit is the way to speed up action.
Speaker: And that's what we're looking to do.
Speaker: Christian, just in terms of your projects, you talked a little bit about collaboration already in the Nordic countries.
Speaker: I think there's some specific things that our listeners might find interesting around hydrogen and a flagship projects that you've got in Norway.
Speaker: What would you like to tell the audience in terms of the challenges and benefits of partnering and how you've worked on that project?
Speaker: I think our projects in general are often quite pioneering.
Speaker: We're either entering new markets or utilizing new technology.
Speaker: And our broader project portfolio is global with key projects spanning from Latin America to Asia via Africa and Europe.
Speaker: And I think some examples are including the big hydrogen projects in Norway.
Speaker: We are currently installing the first 4K scale carbon capture facility on the Heidelbergs
Speaker: which has the capacity of reducing the CO2 emissions by 400,000 tons per year.
Speaker: This is a technology that has been developed within the ACO group for more than 20 years.
Speaker: And as you mentioned, we have a flagship project in Norway
Speaker: You don't know the small town of Norway.
Speaker: It's a place in the northern part of Norway where we are developing an industrial scale green hydrogen project.
Speaker: So the starting point for that project is the fact that there are big differences in the power prices of northern and southern Norway, where you find European prices in the southern part of Norway, whereas you have abundant green energy to primarily hydropower in the north.
Speaker: So power is quite cheap.
Speaker: So that led us to sort of find a way to utilize that power in a way that we can export that to markets that has a need to maybe reduce their power consumption and decarbonize that at the same time.
Speaker: So we are building large scale green hydrogen facilities that will lead into ammonia production and also looking at doing direct reduction of iron
Speaker: There is a large amount of iron ore flowing through the port of Narvik every year.
Speaker: So in this way, we can help decarbonize the shipping industry by selling and exporting the ammonia.
Speaker: And we can also help decarbonizing the steel industry by reducing the iron using green hydrogen rather than coal and coke, which is the natural way of doing that and the most emitting part of the coal or the steelmaking industry.
Speaker: I think again back to the partnerships and the importance of that, when you look at both carbon capture and storage and hydrogen, you can always just focus on the project, but there is really a sort of a need to actually lift the whole value chain at once.
Speaker: You can't just focus on that one project because you need to have power and grid connectivity coming into the hydrogen production.
Speaker: You need to have some sort of way to export it or approach
Speaker: that is easily exported compared to hydrogen in its pure form and and that's that's sort of when we when we need partners to work with them and that is extremely important in in being able to lift these infrastructure and value chain project without having various elements slowing that development down yeah i mean without partnerships we're just going to
Speaker: well, we're not gonna get anywhere basically, but it's also difficult to establish them.
Speaker: And then once you have, you can really scale projects in a particularly effective way.
Speaker: But right now, I wanna come back to you, Greg, and you touched on the supply chain points in your previous comments, and there's a really important one here for the real estate sector generally, and that's the potential for green cement.
Speaker: And, you know, it's a really mission critical topic to address in terms of a decarbonisation journey, but obviously it's very difficult.
Speaker: So what's your sense of how the supply chain aspect that you're thinking about and Green Cement in particular is unfolding and what would help with moving that topic forward a little bit more?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, so green cement is not a bad story in the UAE in the sense that you can actually procure it at relatively good scales right now.
Speaker: The issue is it only takes about, say, 30% of the embodied carbon that's in traditional cement out.
Speaker: And so that industry needs to improve that to 90% plus, which they can do, but just the cost curves aren't quite catching up.
Speaker: too much yet.
Speaker: So again, back to that point of leadership from us, it's important that we engage proactively with the supply chain to ensure that they know that we are buyers, that we will sandbox technologies and innovations with them.
Speaker: We will help enable discussions with our governments around ensuring that innovation in material sciences are buildable and approvable.
Speaker: in terms of building permits and things like that.
Speaker: Again, this idea of the whole ecosystem needing to work together.
Speaker: And more broadly in real estate, you look at cement and then you very quickly move on to other critical items that will involve us getting to net zero in all our homes by 2050, which is low carbon steel, low carbon aluminium, glass, all wrapped in passive design.
Speaker: And each of those elements in the supply chain, including the services supply chain, architects and engineering need to work as collaboratively and as closely as the cement industry locally has done here to improve reductions in body carbon across all those critical supply and material items.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a really useful explanation of what you're doing.
Speaker: One of the things that
Speaker: the financial sector is looking at is what to ask for in terms of disclosure around cement and steel companies to show that they're on a transition journey.
Speaker: And I think one of the coalitions that's being built around creating that demand and transparency is the first mover coalition.
Speaker: But also HSBC does some work with the Mission Possible Partnership, which provides tangible case studies of how to do this.
Speaker: because this takes me on to the next topic, which is financing.
Speaker: And across the financial sector, there are drivers to get more transparency on what a climate plan looks like from the industrial sector.
Speaker: And the rationale for getting that plan is to know how to be able to support it more effectively, right?
Speaker: To be able to provide effective cost of capital, so low cost cost of capital into the projects that are going to
Speaker: drive emissions outcomes and also set individual companies up well for success going forward.
Speaker: Dieter, what's your sense from how financial institutions are addressing ESG in emissions targeting?
Speaker: And does that really affect you or am I kind of wrong in thinking that the financial sector is really getting hot on ESG issues?
Speaker: No, no, it's really, it's incredible what happened over the last years.
Speaker: I mean, I'm doing sustainability now for a couple of years.
Speaker: And when I started my personal journey, it was, well, it wasn't nice to have.
Speaker: Today, a lot of discussions around strategic discussions, finance discussions.
Speaker: are around the ESG and the requests on ESG data and the questions on how you perform with your ESG programs are increasing.
Speaker: I couldn't believe a couple of years ago and I mean today I think there's no discussion around the sustainability report anymore.
Speaker: It's a must and on top of the sustainability report you have to answer ratings
Speaker: You have to answer questionnaires from customers, but also finance institutions.
Speaker: So obviously there's a huge request in showing your ESG performance.
Speaker: And I think this is very logical because ESG performance or the risk of a bad ESG performance is a business risk.
Speaker: So it's natural that the investors are asking for transparency here.
Speaker: And as I said at the beginning, for me, it is very important to have this regulate change because I mean, also the investors, the financial institutions, I mean, they have also to adhere to the regular regulatory requirement.
Speaker: So it trickles down your reporting requirements might trigger down to the industry reporting requirements.
Speaker: And for the time being, it is a bit of a challenge to answer all these requests and have the clarity in the data and the way how you report.
Speaker: On the other hand, we see moving in the right direction.
Speaker: We have the CSRD coming in place in the European Union next year.
Speaker: We have the EU taxonomy also coming in place, already in place.
Speaker: And I don't oversee all the challenges in implementing these regulations.
Speaker: On the other hand, I think it is going in the right direction.
Speaker: And here, again, partnering between financial institutions and also the industry, we need to also to have a common understanding on how to implement and how to really report on those KPIs, because it can only be in the benefit of everybody.
Speaker: And in the end, and this is going to be 100% clear that the direction will be at one point in time,
Speaker: investors will value financial information and ESG information on the same level.
Speaker: And this is for us clear that we go this direction.
Speaker: So that all sounds like it's very straightforward.
Speaker: In the last few minutes,
Speaker: Given the fact that part of the rationale for this series is to raise awareness and raise support for Egypt on the COP27 agenda, I'd just like to hear sort of 40 seconds from each of you and what you would like to see at COP that would help you accelerate your own business strategy or generally that you would like to see from COP from a personal perspective.
Speaker: So I will start with you, Christian.
Speaker: What would you like to see from COP27?
Speaker: I think for us, it's important to have going forward sustainable value chains.
Speaker: I think sort of an increased focus on bringing sustainability throughout the whole value chain, going back to the commodities, the mining of those, turning that green and sort of looking at green steel, green cement and having sort of more focus on the value chain is important for us.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Greg?
Speaker: Net zero commitments with substance.
Speaker: public-private partnerships to get us there.
Speaker: Collaboration will be key.
Speaker: Governments leaning in are crucial.
Speaker: And with COP28 coming quickly off the heels of COP27, I think you're going to see this region really stand up and take a leadership position on this front.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Dieter?
Speaker: Yeah, for me, understanding that the energy sector is maybe crucial for the whole net zero discussion.
Speaker: So accelerate the energy transition in the energy sector by focusing on renewables, infrastructure investment, also in transmission and last but not least scale up the hydrogen economy.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: And May, on the ground there in Egypt right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I believe that COP this year is an important milestone to the international climate agenda.
Speaker: And because this year it comes at a very challenging time with the pandemic and the geopolitical changes.
Speaker: So the focus on implementation, the focus on the energy transition, and as we do believe that it takes time for this transition, and there is a short term that needs to be focused on decarbonization while building innovation and building the future to
Speaker: to reach net zero emissions in the future through hydrogen, through renewable energy, through more innovation that will come up.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So just if I can draw out three points to take away today, the importance of partnerships was a clear one that came from all of you today in terms of scaling the opportunity in the markets.
Speaker: and the series of intent.
Speaker: And both those things will accelerate our action on climate change.
Speaker: Thank you for joining us.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you, Zohar.
Speaker: Thank you all.
Speaker: Thank you for joining us at HSBC Global Viewpoint.
Speaker: We hope you enjoyed the discussion.
Speaker: Make sure you're subscribed to stay up to date with new episodes.
