
Geopolitical Challenges to Industrial Decarbonization Passed
Monday May 5, 2025 11:30 - 12:30 CEST FORUM / AUDIMAX (2nd floor)
Speakers: Amar Bhattacharya, Henry Huiyao Wang, Ingrid Hoven, Isabelle DurantModerator: Katie Gallus
Theme: CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY, GEOECONOMICS AND TRADE, GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
Ensuring a stable global supply chain is crucial to the world’s sustainable development, particularly towards decarbonization efforts throughout the value chain of various cornerstone industries and products. Rising trade tensions and tariff wars, the ever-increasing demand for critical minerals, and risks to global energy security due to geopolitical tensions jeopardize the stability needed to ensure global collaboration on reducing CO2 emissions—a critical step towards the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This is particularly problematic for energy-intensive industries, such as manufacturing, mining, and transportation.
Additionally, the attempt to reshore and friendshore clean technology production networks has triggered debates on the merits of free trade and globalization, broadened energy security concerns, and prompted new South–South relations and regionalisms.
This session will explore these issues in the current geopolitical context and discuss some concrete steps that various stakeholder groups can take to overcome these challenges, which are significant obstacles to the decarbonization efforts in energy-intensive industries.
Speakers
Amar Bhattacharya Speaker
        Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution
      
Henry Huiyao Wang Speaker
        Founder and President
Center for China and Globalization(CCG); Former Counselor to China State Council
      
Virtual Speaker
Ingrid Hoven Speaker
        Managing Director 
GIZ 
      
Isabelle Durant Speaker
        Chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development;
former Deputy Secretary-General of UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD); former Vice-President of the European Parliament
      
Katie Gallus Moderator
        Moderator and Journalist