The Overall Share of African CDM Activities Continues to Be Low

In the paper "An Update on the CDM in Africa in Times of Market Crisis", Nicolas Kreibich, Lukas Hermwille, Christof Arens (all Wuppertal Institute) and Carsten Warnecke (New Climate Institute) review the Clean Development Mechanism's (CDM) performance in Africa and in particular African Least Developed Countries (LDCs). These LDCs have in the past been neglected by the CDM to a large extent. The article also highlights the current developments.

The analysis is based on a quantitative breakdown of data provided by the UNEP DTU CDM Pipeline and was complemented by interviews with selected investors. The findings indicate that despite the various support measures for underrepresented regions, the overall share of African CDM activities continues to be low. The significant rise in the share of Programmes of Activities (PoAs) of recent years cannot make up for the continuing low numbers of African stand-alone projects. Further, the collapse of the compliance market has proved fatal in terms of timing: Ongoing efforts to support the development of a genuine African carbon market were suffocated by the lack of demand for CERs at a moment when capacity building had started to bear fruit. Consequently, instead of being a mitigation tool with significant scale the future role of the CDM in Africa might be limited to the voluntary market while at the same time serving as a tool to foster sustainable development, with mitigation benefits.

The paper "An Update on the CDM in Africa in Times of Market Crisis" was published in "Climate and Development" and is available for download.