Capacity building on Clean Development Mechanism. Topics
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These themes were also developed in some lectures and visits of the Advanced Training Program on Sustainable Development and Environmental Management.
. The atmosphere: overview to understand the causes for climate change, taking into consideration the surface temperature, the CO2 content, the corresponding changes in the composition of the atmosphere, the seas level and precipitation trends due to human interference.
Climate Change
Lectures and visits
. General debate concerning the Earth’s Global Warming and the natural and anthropogenic mechanisms which are deemed to share a responsibility for it and for climate change. Climate as the major factor controlling the global patterns of vegetation structure, productivity and plant and animal species composition; resulting change in temperature and precipitation, affecting agrosytems and plant pathogens; basic mechanisms of climate regulated by global energy balances, but modulated via the complex nonlinear interactions among the several systems participating in the shaping of the Earth climate; intense variability in climate, generated by the just mentioned non-linear interactions, making the detection of small and secular trends very difficult.
. CDM overview: what CDM is, its origin, objectives, the rationale behind it and the main technical issues it has do deal with; how the CDM project cycle is structured, the players and the main steps, with focus on the most important issues, additionality and baselines, and a case study in Brazil; the international regulatory intervention in trying to face the exponential increase of greenhouse gases atmospheric concentrations (Kyoto Protocol, EU Emission trading scheme, Carbon Funds) and business implication for corporate climate change strategy.
Clean Development Mechanism
Lectures and visits
. CDM in practice: important role played by baseline and additionality in the CDM approval and functioning; their influence in the volume and characteristics of the achievable emission reductions; how to draft a credible baseline and to ensure that the project will result in reductions additional to any that would occur in its absence; basic terms and conditions to be used in drafting contracts for the purchase and sale of a variety of emission reductions related products, the major issues to be covered and interrelationships between matters of definition, delivery, validity, verification and certification.
. Italian policies: Italian context (energy and carbon intensity, electricity production by source) on the background of the National Action Plan; the role of the flexible mechanisms.
Policies on Climate Change and CDM
Lectures and visits
. Overview of the EU ETS Directive and explanation of the present situation of non-domestic reduction mechanisms, giving some details about the Italian Carbon Fund and how it works.
. European and Italian Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) strategy; China abatement potential, especially in the power sector; main criteria to evaluate promising CDM projects, together with the major barriers to China’s growth and CDM itself.
. Electricity Market: overall picture of CO2 emissions, price, expected evolution and impact on power prices.
. Overview of the changing electricity market in the background of energy conservation and environment issues. The energy markets: series of fundamental changes pushed by the acceptance of competition; resulting liberalization, globalization and convergence between the power and the gas value chains; assumption that conserving energy requires investment; energy conservation supply curve consequently providing an accounting framework that expresses the potential for energy conservation; the same principle applied to the potential for emission reductions.
