IEA (International Energy Agency)

This award recognises the world’s most authoritative energy agency for its continued leadership in charting the global path to decarbonisation. In November 2025, the IEA published its flagship World Energy Outlook 2025 (WEO‑2025), widely regarded as the gold standard of long‑term energy modelling. The report set out three main scenarios – Current Policies (CPS), Stated Policies (STEPS) and the updated Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario – confirming that fossil fuel demand is nearing its peak even without new policies, while emphasising that far steeper cuts are required to keep the 1.5 °C goal alive. This edition introduced the ACCESS scenario, a first‑of‑its‑kind roadmap to universal energy access by 2035 for electricity and 2040 for clean cooking, expanding the decarbonisation narrative to include social equity alongside emissions reduction.

Beyond the flagship Outlook, the IEA continued to provide the open data and rigorous analysis that underpin virtually every national climate pledge and corporate transition plan. In 2025 it released updated editions of its Net Zero Roadmap, Renewables 2025, Energy Efficiency Progress Tracker and Tracking Clean Energy Progress, each offering granular, verifiable metrics that enable governments and investors to measure what matters. From the first comprehensive study of a 1.5 °C pathway by an official agency in 2021 to the ongoing refinement of those pathways in 2025, the IEA has made decarbonisation not only imaginable but measurable. For providing the scientific and analytical bedrock upon which credible climate action is built, the International Energy Agency receives this recognition.