Climate Mitigation Evaluations: Guidelines

Berlin-based renewable energy policy expert and former program officer at the Global Environment Facility,Christine Wörlen has detailed out clear guidelines to help those evaluating climate mitigation interventions at local, national, sectoral or global levels.

Titled "Guidelines to Climate Mitigation Evaluation" the 64 paged document was commissioned by Climate-Eval online community of practice as part of ongoing efforts to facilitate the evaluation of climate change and development around the world.

Drawing from close to 500 documents contained in climate-Eval's online repository and with inputs from members of the community of practice, Christine examined measurement issues challenging evaluators of climate mitigation notably: systems boundaries, leakages, additionality, co-financing and other forms of joint influencing.

She goes beyond the indicators for evaluating climate mitigation proposed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and The Development Assistance Committee (DAC), arguing that any ambitious evaluation would look beyond these set of indicators. These indicators include relevance, aid effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability.

In addition, the guidelines address barriers that may be hindering the kind of transformation that we seek in climate mitigation interventions such as ignorance, lack of motivation, lack of expertize, lack of assess to mitigation options, lack of affordability, and lack of cost effectiveness at the level of consumers, local financiers and policy makers. These systemic barriers have to be seriously considered in designing interventions if we must achieve the desired transformation, she argues. This is what she refers to as moving from The Theory of No Change (TONC) to the Theory of Action.