In my previous blog, I had highlighted a general lack of urgency in focusing on technology development, diffusion and transfer to deal with climate change.
Many of the public policies needed to achieve low carbon growth in countries over the medium term are already in place, including feed-in tariff regimes, mandatory renewable energy targets and tax incentives. But more such policies may be necessary or existing policy distortions removed if one were to envision massive scale-up in such investments. It becomes both important and interesting to track progress globally as the policies and strategies shift and evolve toward promoting sustainable and low carbon growth paths.
In this backdrop, I would like to report on a recent brainstorming workshop held in Washington to discuss the Climate Change Technology Investment Index (CCTII), a tool that will evaluate and compare enabling environment in countries for supporting private sector investment in climate mitigation technologies. Once developed, CCTII will assess progress made by countries in moving towards a low carbon growth path and help inform private sector investment in ‘climate mitigation’ technologies.
CCTII is the first attempt at finding a way to systematically capture the multitude of barriers - ranging from technical, financial, and markets, to regulatory ones. These would help form some sort of a common, normalized and composite index (or sub-indices) which would make it easy to objectively compare countries on their preparedness and maturity to move into the arena of climate-friendly technologies.
The index goes beyond the more country-focused investment climate assessment, and will help countries better understand the institutional, regulatory, legislative systems that need strengthening. This tool can also help guide and target efforts already being made both by the government and the private sector.
While underlining the useful of this exercise, the workshop emphasized the need for objectivity and transparency in the methodology to be used and the need to work in close partnership with countries that may be interested in piloting this index. So stay tuned!
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