Who Will Deliver the Energy Transition? Why Credibility Matters
As the road to COP31 takes shape, London Climate Action Week focuses on who can deliver the energy transition, with SEforALL entering from a position of growing strength.
Every climate summit and meeting ends with a promise.
Bonn produced a particularly ambitious one.
At the June Climate Meetings, the COP31 Presidency unveiled a new global electrification target: increasing electricity's share of final energy demand from just over 20% today to 35% by 2035.
The Presidency's proposal reflects a growing recognition that electrification sits at the heart of economic development, energy security and climate action. Reaching 35% by 2035 would mark a profound shift in how the world produces, delivers and uses energy.
But it also raises an obvious question: how do we get there?
As London Climate Action Week (LCAW) approaches, that question is becoming central to the climate conversation.
A stronger position and a first-time partner
Held from 20 to 28 June, LCAW gathers the wider world under a theme suited to a turbulent year: cooperation in a fragmented world. Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) joins this year's event as an Official Supporting Partner for the first time. We arrive in a stronger position than we have ever held before.
At COP30, energy moved to the centre of climate implementation. Under the COP30 Presidency's Global Mutirão initiative, we were entrusted with helping to drive three Plans to Accelerate Solutions through 2030, accelerating universal access to energy, doubling energy efficiency, and accelerating solutions for clean cooking in schools. The electricity plan alone calls for 51 million new connections every year by 2028. Access, efficiency and clean cooking are no longer treated in isolation; each is part of the same challenge: building energy systems that support development, strengthen resilience and keep climate targets within reach.
There is no shortage of capital for the energy transition. Clean energy investment reached a record USD 2.2 trillion in 2025, twice what the world spent on oil, gas and coal combined. But only a fraction reached the communities that need it most. Africa is home to a fifth of the world's population, but drew barely 2% of the total, while nearly 600 million people across the continent still lack access to electricity.
What remains in shorter supply are institutions with the credibility, safeguards and delivery capacity to deploy that capital to underserved communities.
It is against this backdrop that we have passed the European Commission's Pillar Assessment. The assessment is the European Union's measure of whether an institution's governance, financial controls and safeguards are strong enough to manage public funds directly. Passing it confirms we meet that standard and gives governments and investors confidence that our ambition is matched by our capacity to deliver.
We are also recognized by the OECD as a 100% Official Development Assistance (ODA)-eligible international organization, enabling partners to count core contributions to our work fully towards their international development commitments.
The harder task is turning credibility into change and that is what the week is for. We will call for greater action and investment: to close energy access gaps, strengthen commitments to just transitions and scale up clean energy. In our Solution Hubs, we will showcase some of the work already driving that agenda forward, including Green Industrialisation, Energy Compacts and Energy Transition and Investment Plans. These plans help a government turn its own priorities into something investable: a clear sequence of policies, technologies and financing to reach its energy and climate goals. Their worth is not measured in emissions alone. Done well, they create jobs, build industry and strengthen the wider economy.
This is why the growing focus on Africa and the leadership of the Global South at this year's LCAW matters and is a shift we have long called for. The inaugural Nigeria Climate Investment Summit on 23 June captures it: African governments setting their own climate agendas and shaping their own energy narratives, on their own terms. With COP32 heading to the continent, that leadership moves to the heart of the global agenda.
The road from Bonn to COP31 will bring new targets, and the proposed 35% electrification goal is unlikely to be the last. But targets are only the beginning.
The focus now shifts to delivery: who is prepared to act, how the energy transition will be financed and whether the institutions to deliver it exist.
Explore our key engagements during LCAW.
