World leaders are changing their tune on the importance of natural gas, and policymakers’ shift has never been more clear than at this week’s Climate Week conversations in New York City.

Multilateral organizations have been some of the last to reconsider their position on natural gas. But as Semafor reports:

“Anna Bjerde, managing director of operations at the World Bank, told a small group of reporters that the lender is agnostic about which technologies it helps finance to improve access to electricity around Africa.

“The main focus of that work has been on solar, she said, but ‘gas has to be discussed and pursued’ for providing baseload power. ‘We should be leaning in to help countries develop gas.’” (emphasis added)

The new comments from World Bank, which stopped financing new upstream oil and gas projects in 2019, come on the heels of a new report from the International Energy Agency discussing the importance of continued investment in oil and gas:

“If all capital investment in existing sources of oil and gas production were to cease immediately, global oil production would fall by 8 percent per year on average over the next decade, or around 5.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) each year. This is equivalent to losing more than the annual output of Brazil and Norway each year. Natural gas production would fall by an average of 9 percent, or 270 bcm, each year, equivalent to total natural gas production from the whole of Africa today.” (emphasis added)

Bjerde has not been the only global leader extolling the benefits of natural gas.

At Climate Week, Mozambique President Daniel Chapo said “he is working to expand the country’s large hydroelectric dam while also pursuing gas production deals with Western drilling companies, and hopes to use more of that gas for domestic power plants,” according to Semafor.

Likewise, the European Commission’s director-general for energy, Ditte Juul Jørgensen, told audiences:

“The energy transition will continue to be our path, but we will need gas for many years to come.” (emphasis added)

The American delegation to NYC Climate Week continued to remind audiences of the importance of US natural gas supply, particularly as European countries look to exit Russian natural gas and the White House pushes for an accelerated timeline.

In an interview with Axios, Jarrod Agen, executive director of the White House National Energy Dominance Council, said:

“It’s Europe, it’s Asia. They are looking for U.S. energy. They want to get off of Russian energy sources, and we have such a supply.”

Read the full post on EIDClimate.org.