Strengthening national capacities for sustainable energy policies in Latin America and the Caribbean(ECLAC)

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has provided assistance in strengthening national capacities to design and implement sustainable energy policies for the production and use of biofuels, as well as to address weak institutional and technical capacity of governments to deploy and implement effective evidence-based energy efficiency policies and programmes, with particular attention to policies on innovation. These efforts have contributed to creating an enabling environment for sustainable energy policies at national and regional levels.

Over the past decade, ECLAC has undertaken work on analyzing the economic impacts of climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean, and on identifying appropriate energy policy responses and mitigation strategies. With the funding from the Development Account, ECLAC launched a three-year project in 2009 on Strengthening national capacities to design and implement sustainable energy policies for the production and use of biofuels in Latin America and the Caribbean, which involved 12 countries from the region. The project aimed at strengthening national capacities to design and implement sustainable energy policies for the production and use of biofuels.

A second Development Account funded project, Towards a Low Carbon Economy in Latin America: Policy Options for Energy Efficiency and Innovation, was launched in 2013. The project built on the results of the first project and continued to strengthen the institutional and technical capacity of Latin America and Caribbean governments to deploy and implement effective evidence-based energy efficiency policies and programmes at the national level, with particular attention to policies on innovation. The project started with the participation of six countries and, by the end of the project, involved 19 countries from the region.

Impact of capacity development interventions at national and regional levels

The projects complemented each other’s achievements to create an enabling environment for sustainable energy policies at both national and regional levels. The first project raised awareness of the need for a multi-sectoral approach to energy planning and introduced the Long-range Energy Alternatives Planning System (LEAP) model as a tool for cross-sectoral policy debate. The project’s impact on Latin American and Caribbean countries, in terms of the ability of local stakeholders to establish sustainable energy policies, legislation and/or planning outcomes for biofuel production and use, includes:

  • The new Biofuels Act in Panama, developed by the National Energy Secretariat on the basis of the LEAP-based 2030 energy scenarios and related staff training;
  • A detailed analysis of transport policy, based on the LEAP energy scenarios, undertaken by the Costa Rican Government as part of its ambitious plans to reduce CO2 emissions by 2020;
  • The use of the LEAP energy scenarios as the basis for research and policy formulation by the Ministry of Mines and Energy in Nicaragua; and
  • The work of the Ministry of Energy in Bolivia to carry out a national energy development plan based on the LEAP scenarios developed as part of the project.

Building on the results of the first project, the second project facilitated the sharing of knowledge and experiences from a European regional initiative on monitoring energy efficiency through the use of energy efficiency indicators (ODYSSEE Project) and helped build consensus among country representatives on the need to monitor energy efficiency to facilitate and promote evidence-based energy efficiency policies and programmes. The project helped improve national capacities to compile disaggregated demographic, economic, activity-level and energy consumption data in order to calculate energy efficiency indicators at the sectoral levels, including the macroeconomic framework, the energy sector, households, industry, transport, service sector and agricultural sector. The project also enhanced the knowledge of stakeholders on the link between economic activity and energy consumption, and enhanced the capacity of governments to promote policy making based on data and indicators. An interactive Base Indicators for Energy Efficiency (BIEE) / DataMapper platform was further developed that displays the main indicators obtained by countries to facilitate comparability and provide a regional overview. Substantial progress regarding the quantitative performance indicators was achieved in the case of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, México, Paraguay and Uruguay. These and other countries have used the project’s outputs to coordinate and implement activities related to their own country energy development agendas.

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