together they mean that the riskretum profile of lowcarbon investments is often less attractive than their fossil fuelbased equivalents scalingup financing to a lowcarbon economy will not happen spontaneously it requires strong policy and price signals to ensure that lowcarbon and energy efficiency investments offer a sufficiently attractive riskadjusted return compared to available alternatives iea these are presented in the shaded part of table and are briefly discussed in the following section they are the subject of other chapters in this report