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The Philippines should take advantage of its standing as one of the emerging hotspots for renewable energy (RE) investments as it tries to secure larger overseas financing for wind farms and other RE projects in the country.

Thus, said Camarines Sur 2nd district Rep. LRay Villafuerte, a champion of clean energy in the House of Representatives.

“The government should exert its best effort in seeking more RE investments overseas from clean energy champions such as Denmark, more so now when rich economies that are also the world’s worst polluters had committed $300 billion only," Villafuerte said.

According to the Bicolano, the amount is less than a fourth of the $1.3 trillion that disaster-prone economies including the Philippines had asked for in annual climate financing support during the 29th annual COP (Conference of Parties) summit held last year in Baku.

Worse than the relatively paltry amount, he said, was the pledge of the affluent member-states of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) during COP29 to triple this annual climate financing target from the current $100 billion to $300 billion, but by 2035.

“So, with the sub-par, long-in-coming pledge of $300 billion for climate financing from heavily-polluting industrialized countries during the COP29 in Baku, one way for our government to secure more funds for climate financing is to leverage the Philippines’ status as the second most attractive destination for RE investors," Villafuerte said.

“The government can hope to achieve our country’s ambitious decarbonization goal only by getting ample funding from overseas investors for more RE projects to seriously wean our country away from fossil fuel in the global transition to a low-carbon, if not zero-carbon, carbon-neutral, economy,” said the National Unity Party (NUP) president and former House deputy speaker.

The Philippines has made a spectacular leap as an attractive place for RE investments from 20th place among 110 emerging markets in the world in 2021, to 4th in 2023.

Then, in 2024, it further climbed to the 2nd spot according to the Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) Climatescope report. This makes the Philippines the top country for RE investments in the world, next to India.

BNEF noted that the Philippine government has established a target of 35 percent RE in power generation by 2030, and “the Philippines stands out as the only emerging market in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) to have all of the RE policies surveyed by Climatescope—auctions, net-metering schemes, tax incentives and a clean energy target—in force.”

The Philippines has attracted $5.2 billion worth of RE investments over the past five years, according to BNEF, but just 7 percent of this total amount came from overseas investments.

In 2023, RE investments was estimated by BNEF at $1.98 billion, or nearly 88 percent more than the year-before total investments of $1.058 billion.

The Climatescope lists the Philippines ahead of China, Kenya, Romania, Brazil, Chile, Nigeria, Namibia and Guatemala.