With this year’s special theme, the conference particularly welcomes contributions, which extend the understanding of the interplay between the three phenomena of green transition, emerging markets, and foreign direct investment (FDI) and its implications for global sustainability.
While the unsustainable atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases (GHG) originates primarily from high-income countries, today emerging economies account for the majority of global GHG emissions, with emissions continuing to rise. Growing energy demand in emerging economies sustains fossil fuel exploration and consumption, contributing to global climate challenges. Beyond climate change, these economies are also grappling with escalating environmental degradation, including air, water, and land pollution caused by industrial activities, urbanization, and resource extraction. The cumulative impact of these environmental challenges exacerbates health risks, disrupts ecosystems, and threatens sustainable development.
Emerging economies often bear the brunt of these environmental crises due to their geographic vulnerabilities, economic dependencies, institutional constraints, and limited capacities for adaptation and mitigation. At the same time, these nations hold promise for advancing green transitions, potentially unlocking new windows of opportunity for industrial upgrading, supported by FDI and innovative technologies. Successfully addressing climate change and environmental degradation requires coordinated efforts by national governments, multinational companies, supranational organizations, international financiers, and civil societies.
While the Paris Agreement of 2015 generated strong momentum for climate action and green transition, recent years have witnessed waning political and private sector support. This decline has coincided with a more confrontational geopolitical environment, trade and technology frictions, nationalist and populist tendencies, the restructuring of global value chains, and monetary tightening. Simultaneously, pollution of air, water, and soil continues to pose significant challenges, with waste mismanagement, industrial contamination, and agricultural runoffs undermining progress toward sustainability.
The activities of multinational companies and their FDI, alongside international financial flows, are deeply intertwined with environmental outcomes. On the one hand, these corporations possess the financial, technological, and organizational resources needed to address climate change and other forms of environmental degradation. On the other hand, they can perpetuate unsustainable practices, including shifting resource-intensive and polluting activities to emerging economies, engaging in environmental dumping, and contributing to carbon leakage and ecological damage.
The manifold interlinkages between green transitions, environmental sustainability, emerging economies, and FDI require deeper investigation. Empirical and conceptual analyses, coupled with science-based prescriptions, are essential to illuminate these complex relationships and guide global efforts toward achieving sustainable development while mitigating environmental harm.
Copenhagen Conference on Outward Investment from Emerging Economies 