This report is part of the United Nations Development Programme’s Global Environment Facility’s (UNDP-GEF) efforts to codify and share lessons learnt from how scarce public resources can be used to catalyse larger private financial flows for renewable energy. It provides an overview of UNDP-GEF projects in 14 developing countries which are supporting the development of national renewable energy policies based around feed-in tariffs and related instruments. In these activities UNDP-GEF assists developing countries to assess key risks and barriers to technology diffusion and then to identify a mix of policy and financial de-risking measures to remove these barriers and drive investment. This approach is illustrated through three case studies in Uruguay, Mauritius and Kazakhstan. The report finds that a key challenge for policy makers is to create the conditions to make renewable energy attractive to investors and utilities without jeopardising the attainment of other development goals.
This summary was prepared by Eldis.
This paper explores the value of green growth from the perspective of sustainable development practitioners. First, it provides a brief definition of green growth, and why the concept is relevant for meeting Africa’s challenges. It then discusses how green growth can be achieved, highlighting some of the primary tools for achieving it, and then discussing focal areas that we believe will have the greatest impacts by spurring growth sustainably. Finally, it discusses how the AfDB has promoted green growth through its own initiatives. Boxes throughout the paper provide examples of the AfDB’s promotion of green growth in its project portfolio.
The publication addresses in detail seven priority areas for the Rio+20 conference: decent jobs, energy, sustainable cities, food security and sustainable agriculture, water, oceans and disaster readiness.
The overriding challenge for many European governments today is to reduce major fiscal deficits with the least collateral damage to the economy. This report shows that carbon fiscal measures may raise significant revenues while having a less detrimental macro-economic impact than other tax options. This gives them an important potential role in fiscal policy; a role that is currently widely overlooked. This benefit arising from carbon fiscal measures goes beyond the usual arguments in their favour – namely that they are crucial, cost effective instruments to reduce Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions. The main focus of this report has been on the immediate opportunities for carbon pricing to assist with deficit reduction. In addition to this, the report explores whether there may also be longer term opportunities to raise greater revenue from carbon pricing while improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the EU ETS.
Based on more than 40 interviews with energy sector CEOs and senior executives, as well as the 2012 Energy Sustainability Index, this 4th edition of the World Energy Trilemma report attempts to identify and describe what industry executives believe they need from policymakers. The report acknowledges that executives and policymakers urgently need to work together in order to achieve a transition to a sustainable energy system. Key to this report are the three dimensions of energy sustainability: energy security, social equity and environmental impact mitigation. These three core dimensions form a complex web of links between private and public actors, regulators, resources, economic and social forces, and environmental concerns that must be fully understood by all.
Energy consumption is growing in developing countries at a great pace and improvements in energy efficiency (EE) could provide opportunity for economic growth while providing broader access to energy and related services even from limited energy resources. This report underlines that moving the developing world towards a low carbon economy requires a scaling up of financing for EE. It examines the current role of climate finance in funding EE projects and the potential to channel funds to relevant EE projects under the new Green Climate Fund. The report focuses primarily on public climate finance flows from North to South, probing the current use of funds from multilateral development banks, bilateral financial institutions and carbon markets for energy efficiency projects in developing countries. The report makes eight recommendations on the design of climate and sustainable energy finance programmes to ensure that EE projects are adequately funded by climate finance.
This summary was prepared by Eldis.