Presented from the perspective of leading renewable energy financiers from London and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this report describes the opportunities and challenges of renewable energy finance in the MENA region. The MENA region is attractive to investors today for several reasons; however, policy and regulation are central to investment conditions. Most MENA governments do not have a national renewable energy regime in place, making investment decisions in the region challenging.

Using a real options model, the authors of this report seek to analyze the decision of an electricity producer to invest in new capacity, select the type of technology, and optimize its operation. The model finds that if policymakers can assure renewable energy producers there is no chance feed-in tariffs will be abandon over a 30-year period, ratepayers will see a noticeable decline in the feed-in tariff level required to spur maximum investment in renewable energy sources.

This policy brief presents a set of policy recommendations on coordination mechanisms resulting from the identification and analysis of a broad range of European best practices. Solid multi-level governance models are a prerequisite for the development of coherent and synergistic plans; still, effective coordination mechanisms among policy layers are difficult to emplace, according to the authors.

This policy brief features a set of policy recommendations resulting from the identification and analysis of a large array of best practices on monitoring and verification (M&V) schemes across Europe. Effective methods to measure energy savings are necessary to assess the progresses achieved by national energy efficiency plans; still, the development of effective M&V schemes remain a challenge, according to the authors.

The capacity building hub collaborates with global stakeholders and institutions across the energy value chain, and leverages their mutual strengths to foster attainment of the ambitious goals. The hub undertakes a demand-driven approach to catalyze change. It is a special-purpose vehicle that facilitates - awareness generation/sensitization, knowledge assimilation and dissemination, design and delivery of programmes of change, and identification of research gaps.

Lighting a Billion Lives is a global initiative to facilitate clean energy access and the delivery of last mile energy services for basic and productive use. The initiative enables energy poor communities to transition from traditional and inefficient energy sources to modern, more efficient and sustainable energy solutions. The initiative accelerates market development for clean energy technologies through knowledge sharing, capacity building and market seeding.

GRIHA (Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment) is a rating tool that helps people assesses the performance of their building against certain nationally acceptable benchmarks. It evaluates the environmental performance of a building holistically over its entire life cycle, thereby providing a definitive standard for what constitutes a ‘green building’. The rating system, based on accepted energy and environmental principles, seeks to strike a balance between the established practices and emerging concepts, both national and international.

The Specialized Library on Climate Change houses wide array of resources on climate change related issues, both in print and electronic form. The website provides information about all the resources and services offered by the library. The library catalogue of print and electronic resources and database of literature abstracts can be accessed on-line. Current awareness services like listing of new arrivals and compilation of latest news and events are also provided on-line.

The major objectives of the ENVIS Centre are collection and dissemination of information in order to support and promote research, development and innovation among researcher, policy makers, academics and other stakeholders. The Centre is actively engaged in data gaps identification and bridging, resource generation and data collection, capacity-building and information dissemination activities.

This is a European on-shore wind resources at 50 meters of altitude map, developed by Riso National Laboratory in 1989. The map shows the so-called generalised wind climate over Europe, also sometimes referred to as the regional wind climate or simply the wind atlas. In such a map, the influences of local topography have been removed and only the variations on the large scale are shown.