An economy the world can buy into

An Economy the World Can Buy Into

This week the world's investors were told, in the careful language of an index review, that Oman's stock market has never been closer to their reach. A global index provider placed us on its watch list for promotion to emerging market status, the category many of our neighbours already occupy, and years of patient work by our regulators and our exchange deserved every bit of the celebration that followed.

Our climate plan, submitted to the United Nations this summer, sets out the economy we intend to build: a 33 per cent cut in emissions by 2035 on the way to net-zero by 2050, and at least 1 million metric tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030. The plan prices the 2035 cut at some $31 billion of investment across energy, industry, waste, and agriculture over the coming decade.

Of that 33 per cent, 26 points are offered to the world as an invitation, conditional on international finance, technical support, technology transfer, and capacity building. In the negotiating rooms I have returned to for more than a decade, that invitation is answered from government to government, and it will continue to be answered there. Promotion would open a separate door beside the negotiation: the funds that decide where the savings of millions of people are invested could buy into the economy the plan describes, company by company.

Last month I wrote in this column that implementation is a long chain of handovers between institutions that do not share a vocabulary. We have started preparing for the handover from climate targets to investment. The national climate platform we launched at the summit in Belém last year was built to turn strategies into projects that development banks and commercial lenders can finance; in June the Green Climate Fund agreed to support the work of building a climate investment plan and a pipeline of projects ready for capital.

Much of what brought us to this threshold came from the state offering shares in its companies, and that work built the market we now have. The next listings could come from the economy the climate plan describes, from solar and wind developers to the engineering and service firms growing up around our new industrial zones. Whether many of them are private Omani firms, grown from supply contracts into companies an investor wants to back, will decide how much of this transition we come to own ourselves.

Some of the investors could be us. An Omani pension might one day own a share of a solar field in the desert, and the savings you keep might hold a piece of the grid that carries its power, so the value of the transition circulates through the country that hosts it.

With the world watching, we will also raise the standard we hold ourselves to. The funds now looking at us will ask what our companies emit and how they will earn their living as the world's demand for what we sell today changes, and an Omani company that can answer both with confidence will find capital easier to come by.

In March, the index provider will tell us whether our market has arrived. No one has yet set a date for the morning that should follow, when a company born of our new energy economy lists on our exchange; it will be set here, by whoever in this country decides to build such a company and by those of us ready to own a piece of it.