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Ceres Clean Trillion

Ceres is a Boston-based, 25-year-old nonprofit organization advocating for sustainability leadership by mobilizing a powerful network of investors, companies, and public interest groups to accelerate and expand the adoption of sustainable business practices and solutions to build a healthy global economy. Ceres created the “Clean Trillion” investment campaign, a clarion call to raise at least $1 trillion by 2030, which would be approximately a three-fold jump in investment levels of 2015, which stood at $329b.

While 2015’s record investment in clean energy is encouraging, it is far from enough to make the transition from fossil to clean fuels that is required to keep global warming to no more than 2° Celsius. In the fall of 2014, the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based organization of 29 developed countries, released calculations estimating the world needed to invest $36 trillion in clean energy  an additional $1 trillion per year in clean energy by 2050, approximately $1 trillion more per year, to have an 80% chance of maintaining the 2° limit.  

Ceres offers 10 recommendations for investors, companies, and policymakers to increase annual global investment by 203, divided into three categories (1) mobilizing investor action to scale up clean energy; (2) promoting green banking and debt capital markets; and (3) reforming climate, energy, and financial policies.

Download the report here.

Author Bio

Eileen V. Quigley is Founder and Executive Director of the Clean Energy Transition Institute, which develops research and analytics to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy in the Northwest.

From 2017-2019, Eileen led development of the Northwest Deep Decarbonization Pathways study and wrote the report of its findings, Meeting the Challenge of Our Time: Pathways to a Clean Energy Future for the Northwest, the first economy-wide analysis of decarbonization pathways mapped to the Northwest’s economic and institutional realities.

Eileen spent seven years from 2009-2016 at Climate Solutions serving as Director of Strategic Innovation and oversaw the New Energy Cities, Sustainable Advanced Fuels/a>, and Northwest Biocarbon Initiative programs.

She currently serves on the Board of Stockholm Environment Institute-US and the Advisory Board of Western Washington University’s Institute for Energy Studies. Eileen received her Master of Science in Journalism from Columbia University and her Bachelor of Arts in Literature from Yale University.

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