Assessing the Climate and Sustainable Development Impacts of Projects and Policies

The close links between the climate change and the sustainable development agendas have led to growing demands for tools that can assess the multiple benefits of climate projects and policies. These linkages also open opportunities to bring climate finance to development needs such as controlling air pollution and improving health. Accessing this finance and improving projects and policies means policymakers need to understand how these tools can be used to improve their projects and projects. This webinar introduced how different international organisations and research institutions are using tools to assess the sustainable development impacts of climate change and development projects.

The webinar began by highlighting recent developments in negotiations over Article 6 in the Paris Agreement have opened opportunities “to co-develop common but nationally appropriate SD tools for learning and using SD as a leverage for climate action ambition raising.” It also highlighted how groups such as the United Nations Environment Programme-Technical University Denmark (UNEP-DTU), Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) are working with partners to help more systematically assess different sustainable development benefits of climate projects. It further noted that there are important experiences to learn from countries such as Indonesia that has a long track-record of ex ante and ex post assessing and reporting on different co-benefits under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Credit Mechanism (JCM). Other countries in Asia such as Laos PDR and the Philippines could also share similar experiences with tools for assessing benefits for not climate projects as well as policies under the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). These experiences will also be useful for the private sector in developed countries to increase the sustainability of their operations and investments. The air pollution community can also usefully contribute to discussions over sustainability assessment as there is a rich history of analysing the link between climate change, air pollution and health.