Paris Agreement requires substantial, broad, and sustained policy efforts beyond COVID-19 public stimulus packages.

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 °C target of the Paris Agreement. Here, we provide complementary perspectives to reiterate that substantial, broad, and sustained policy efforts 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.