Promoting Renewable Energy Investments for Climate Change Mitigation and Sustainable Development
UNESCWA is implementing a capacity building project aiming at enhancing renewable energy (RE) investments in member countries in the context of climate change mitigation.
The project seeks to promote investments in RE through strengthening national capacities in attracting private investments in the RE area and specifically in developing economically, environmentally, socially and financially viable projects. Through a close cooperation with the countries concerned, ESCWA is supporting the development of a desirable investment framework, through a series of interactive events, which capitalizes on the participation of local experts. The aim is to facilitate the increased mobilization of financial resources for renewable energy investments.
Planned activities include: (a) skills development for public and private sectors at the national level to identify, develop and implement RE investment projects; (b) assistance to authorities to introduce regulatory and institutional reforms needed to support these investment projects; and (c) identifying opportunities for financing renewable energy projects in the region. Activities will also include case studies on the experience of policy reforms, regional trainings, workshops and seminars focusing on policy reforms and investment projects development
An important goal of these activities is to identify RE project holders in ESCWA Member Countries and support them in developing their business plans and preparing bankable proposals that allow them an improved access to financing opportunities. The resulting proposals will form a regional pipeline of RE projects.
These activities are being developed in cooperation with UN ECE, and are in full concordance with the objectives of the UN SE4All decade and the UN sustainable development goals (SDG7 and SDG12).
LIST OF PLANNED PROJECT ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:
Regional training on RE project development, finance and business planning (Last week of April /First week of May 2016): A regional trainings is scheduled to provide national officials and experts with necessary technical assistance in RE project development, finance and business planning. The training intends to build capacity of RE project developers / consultants in preparing bankable RE proposals.
Close technical assistance to beneficiary countries in preparing RE projects pipeline:
Based on the submittal of project proposals from Member countries, project developers from at least three countries will benefit from a close technical assistance / coaching by ESCWA in developing bankable proposals for their projects. Extensive assistance will be provided to develop detailed business plans and to help in the drafting of the corresponding project documents of selected projects. The produced documents would be ready for submittal to domestic and international investors, banks, investment funds or other financial institutions.
Case studies:
In coordination with national coordinators and national respective participating institutions, 4 case studies will be developed in an attempt to highlight the impact of policy and regulatory reforms on the level of RE project deployment.
Policy seminar:
A policy seminar will be held in the light of the developed case studies to promote RE project financing and to highlight the importance of institutional frameworks, policy reforms and their implementation instruments in supporting the promotion of RE investments.
Regional workshop on the mobilization of RE investments:
The workshop covers the regulatory and policy requirements and purely technical aspects that countries would need to deal with when attracting and implementing RE investments based on foreign or national capital.
End of project workshop:
The workshop will bring together officials from the two regions (UN ESCWA and UN ECE) along with major domestic and foreign investors. The closing workshop will present business plans from investment project pipelines from the two regions that would be considered for financing by various financial institutions and would have a good chance to receive investments.
Online platform for knowledge sharing:
The platform will be online towards the end of the project and will provide a knowledge base on promoting investments in renewable energy projects, available international financing mechanisms and best practices. It will contain a database of case studies, as well as proposed and approved institutional and policy reforms and other related information (financing schemes, capacity building, institutional strengthening etc.). The platform will include a compilation of best practices and lessons learned from other regions, as well as web links to other relevant web sites and pages.
The activities related to this DA project are expected to be completed by December 2017.