On December 4th, the Clean Energy Solutions Center, Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, and ClimateWorks Foundation convened a joint side event at COP-18 in Doha on clean energy policy best practices and resources. The three organizations are partnering to advance use of effective clean energy policies and practices.
The presentations highlighted relevant resources, activities, and tools that they offer to advance use of effective clean energy policies and programs and a discussion was held on these resources with the in-person and on-line audience. Approximately 5000 participants joined the dialogue via the web and over 30 engaged in person in Doha.
Veronica Westacott, Manager of Multilateral Engagement, for Australia’s Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism (DRET) provided an overview of the library of policy reports, tools, and data bases along with the no cost expert assistance and peer learning activities offered by the Clean Energy Solutions Center.
Veronica highlighted that the Solutions Center has provided expert policy assistance through an international network in response to more than 60 requests from countries and is looking to expand demand and use of this service while also further enhancing the resources on the site and continuing to convene webinars and other peer learning forums and conduct analysis on emerging policy topics.
Eva Oberender, Director of Programmes at REEEP described the organisation's broad portfolio of more than 150 projects in 65 countries conducted in collaboration with more than 400 network partners and regional offices and the extensive capabilities of reegle.info, a clean energy information portal operated by REEEP.
Eva noted that reegle.info has over 220,000 users per month and facilitates access to clean energy data from sources throughout the world with state of the art linked open data and tagging systems (eg. the reegle Tagging API), a clean energy search engine, and a comprehensive thesaurus describing climate change as well as renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Laura Segafredo, Senior Global Research Associate, ClimateWorks Foundation and Francisco Posada Sanchez, Researcher, International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) provided an overview of the policy best practice networks supported by the ClimateWorks Foundation.
They gave specific examples of the work of the ICCT on vehicle performance standards (fuel economy/GHG) and of the Collaborative Labeling and Appliance Standards Program in defining and accelerating use of transformative low carbon transportation and appliance efficiency policies and measures with in-depth collaborative work in key emerging economies and broader outreach and dissemination activities.
The audience asked questions about access to the resources from these institutions and engagement with the partnerships, about strategies for ensuring that policy implementation is sustained, and about collaboration with the private sector.
Most of the resources presented are openly available to anyone with some of the more in-depth technical assistance available just to governments and technical institutes that support governments.
Written by Ron Benioff, NREL