Brazil joins Clean Energy Marine Hubs Initiative

The government of Brazil has joined the Clean Energy Marine Hubs Initiative (CEM Hubs), an international public-private platform between energy, maritime, shipping and finance communities.

The CEM Hubs initiative is a first-of-its-kind, cross-sectoral public-private platform jointly led by an industry task force of CEOs and energy ministers under the banner of Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM).  

Coinciding with the UN Climate Change Conference COP 28 that took place in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), from November 30 to December 12, 2023, the South American country signed up to the initiative, alongside Uruguay, Norway and Panama and founder partners the UAE and Canada.

Brazil recently announced that it will host the CEM15 next year, pairing the ministerial meeting with its G20 presidency.

As informed by the Brazilian Minister of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira, the 15th Ministerial Meeting of CEM and the 9th Ministerial Meeting of Mission Innovation will be held in the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguaçu in September 2024, back-to-back with the G20 Energy Transition Ministerial Meeting (ETMM) and with support from Itaipu Binacional, a binational entity equally owned by Brazil and Paraguay that focuses on clean and renewable energy.

The country also decided to become an official member of the workstreams Transforming Solar, lead by Germany and IRENA, and Industrial Deep Decarbonisation Initiative (IDDI), co-led by the UK and India.

The CEM Hubs initiative comes under CEM which will formalize a work program in the first quarter of 2024 alongside the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH), with supporting organizations International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Global Maritime Centre for Decarbonisation (GMCD) and other industry partners.

“The CEM Hubs workstreams will establish how the energy hubs will get funded, to de-risk investments for infrastructure to get built, how safety will be addressed and how these new hubs could operate as a network rather than a series of bilateral export-import trade lanes,” Stuart Neil, ICS’s Strategy and Communications Director, said.