Excellencies, colleagues,

I have the honour to speak on behalf of the EU and its Member States.

The EU and its Member States welcome today’s Global Stocktaking on the UN Decade of Sustainable Energy. We actively participated in the preparatory process.

When in 2012 the General Assembly declared the UN Decade of Sustainable Energy, 1.3 billion people were without electricity and 2.6 billion people relied on traditional biomass for cooking and heating.

While the world’s population has strongly grown in the last decade, these numbers have fallen considerably. They have almost halved to 675 million for people without electricity in 2021 and were reduced in smaller measure to 2.1 billion for people without access to clean cooking, according to preliminary UN figures for 2022. Also on the positive side, the share of renewable energy in energy production and consumption has risen strongly, though still not fast enough.

Among the negative trends is the insufficient and uneven investment in support to developing countries on renewable energy and on transitioning away from fossil fuels. We will have to focus our support and cooperation on making this energy transition a reality, as there will be no sustainable energy for all on a burning planet.

Let me respond to the three questions that you have posed in the concept note:

Firstly, “how can ambitions be further increased and implementation be further accelerated?”

As far as the EU is concerned, we invite partners to closely work with us to accelerate and benefit from the green transition and supports the implementation of global commitments through frameworks such as Green Alliances, Green Partnerships, Green Agendas, high-level dialogues, trade agreements and other important formats for cooperation, such as the Samoa Agreement. We reiterate the importance of the Just Energy Transition Partnerships and remain committed to their further operationalization with the support of the relevant partners.

The EU will continue to work closely with partners worldwide, in particular with the most vulnerable and with partner countries that have put forward ambitious climate and energy plans. We will do this through the NDICI Global Europe and Team Europe initiatives and under the Global Gateway Strategy, amongst others. We underline the importance of the private sector and businesses in this regard.

We encourage G20 members to take the lead in implementing the outcome of the first climate Global Stocktake – much of which is energy-relevant – including the transition away from fossil fuels, tripling renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 and the acceleration of zero- and low emission technologies. We are committed to work with partner countries to develop and implement ambitious Nationally-Determined Contributions (NDCs) with a 2035 target, with strong energy components.

The EU and its Member States are determined to engage with partner countries to promote an energy sector predominantly free of fossil fuels well ahead of 2050 in line with the mid-century climate neutrality goal, and work towards implementation, through accelerated action in this critical decade, aiming to achieve a fully or predominantly decarbonised global power system in the 2030s, calling for leaving no room for new coal power. In this regard, we highlight the importance for effective cooperation with partner countries, including through multilateral initiatives such as the Powering Past Coal Alliance. We recall the need for phasing out as soon as possible fossil fuel subsidies which do not address energy poverty or just transition.

We welcome the Global Renewables and Energy Efficiency Pledge adopted in UAE and encourage all partners to integrate tripling global renewable energy capacity and doubling the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030 into their climate and energy plans.

We recognize the urgent need to deliver on energy poverty and to ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all in line with SDG7, including through gender-responsive finance models to combat gendered effects of energy poverty.

Secondly, “how can multi-stakeholder partnerships be scaled up?”

Multi-stakeholder partnerships are indeed key for achieving SDG7. We have mentioned EU-partnerships before. We also note that the UN Decade was instrumental for creating Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), an international organization that works in partnership with the UN and other stakeholders to drive faster action towards access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all by 2030. We thank Ms. Damilola Ogunbiyi for the information she delivered on SE4All’s achievements and thank her and her team for their work so far.

The around 200 Energy Compacts that resulted from the High-Level Dialogue on Energy convened by the Secretary-General in 2021 are another good example of multi-stakeholder partnerships for SDG7. The EU and its Member States have initiated several of these energy compacts. We are interested to work with energy compacts initiated by others, and to stimulate peer-learning and benchmarking to get a better grip on the state of the art of these projects in pursuit of SDG7.

Finally, on “institutional arrangements for continuing to advance international cooperation on energy beyond the UN Decade of Sustainable Energy for All”

We are in the hands of the UN Secretariat here to propose eventual strengthening of arrangements, which can be negotiated under the 2^nd Committee energy resolution this autumn, for instance. A detailed activity report of the Decade would help, to learn from the institutional strengths and weaknesses in the decade 2014-2024. It is clear that we will need a strong monitoring framework for the implementation of the tripling and doubling pledge on renewable energy and energy efficiency, respectively. We also note that current institutional arrangements of UN Energy seem rather lose, acting mainly as a network of existing institutions. We are interested in the assessment of the UN Secretariat to which extent these arrangements are up to speed to support our necessary acceleration of international cooperation to achieve SDG7 globally.

I thank you.