Sir David King, the UK Foreign Secretary’s permanent Special Representative for Climate Change, will visit South Africa from 10-12 April 2016.

His visit will focus on the Mission Innovation agreement as a follow up to the COP21 discussions in Paris in 2015. In June this year, Mission Innovation’s 20 signatory states, of which the UK is one, will collectively commit to a framework for doubling investment in renewable energy research and development to $20 billion over five years. This public and private finance is a critical component for increasing the momentum of the uptake of renewables, and plays a key role in improving access to energy, energy security, and socioeconomic development.

There will be a strong overarching economic and business focus to the visit with Sir David meeting members of the business community and South African government.

Notes for Editors:

1.    Sir David will be speaking at a public seminar on Renewable Energy: Investment, Innovation and Opportunity in a Post-COP21 World. This will take place at the CSIR International Convention Centre in Pretoria at 1400 on Monday 11 April 2016. Please RSVP to janine.ablas@fco.gov.uk.

2.    Mission Innovation aims to reinvigorate and accelerate global clean energy innovation with the objective to make clean energy widely affordable.

Accelerating widespread clean energy innovation is:

An indispensable part of an effective, long term global response to our shared climate challenge;
Necessary to provide affordable and reliable energy for everyone and to promote economic growth; and
Critical for energy security.

While important progress has been made in cost reduction and deployment of clean energy technologies, the pace of innovation and the scale of transformation and dissemination remains significantly short of what is needed.

Mission Innovation will help accelerate the global clean energy revolution.

Mission Innovation was launched at the COP21 in Paris last December, and has been signed by a mix of developed and developing countries, including the UK, US and Australia, as well as Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia.

Sir David King:

The Foreign Secretary appointed Sir David King as his new permanent Special Representative for Climate Change in September 2013. Sir David was previously the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor from 2000 – 2007, during which time he raised awareness of the need for governments to act on climate change and was instrumental in creating the Energy Technologies Institute. He also served as the Founding Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford; was Head of the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University 1993-2000 and Master of Downing College at Cambridge 1995 -2000.

Sir David has published over 500 papers on science and policy, for which he has received numerous awards, and holds 22 Honorary Degrees from universities around the world. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991, a Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and knighted in 2003, Sir David was also made an Officier of the French Legion d’Honneur’ in 2009, for work which has contributed to responding to the climate and energy challenge.

Link to report: http://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/projects/climate-change-risk-assessment/