  It has been claimed that COVID-19 public stimulus packages could be
sufficient to meet the short-term energy investment needs to leverage a shift
toward a pathway consistent with the 1.5 degrees C target of the Paris
Agreement. Here we provide complementary perspectives to reiterate that
substantial, broad, and sustained engagements beyond stimulus packages will be
needed for achieving the Paris Agreement long-term targets. Low-carbon
investments will need to scale up and persist over the next several decades
following short-term stimulus packages. The required total energy investments
in the real world can be larger than the currently available estimates from
Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). Existing databases from IAMs are not
sufficient for analyzing the effect of public spending on emission reduction.
To inform what role COVID-19 stimulus packages and public investments may play
for reaching the Paris Agreement targets, explicit modelling of such policies
is required.
