Sustainable Development Policies and Measures (SDPAMs)

WRI’s SDPAMs initiative aims to find ways to help major developing countries find policies and measures that meet their own sustainable development goals more effectively, while creating significant benefits for the global climate.

Developing countries have a number of urgent priorities, which vary in detail from country to country—reducing poverty, providing energy services to those without them, managing external debt, and energy security issues—to name but a few.

It’s not surprising that climate protection is not an urgent priority. In addition, these countries mostly have much lower per-capita greenhouse gas emissions than developed countries, and a lower share of the historical responsibility for climate change. For these reasons, developing countries have been consistently opposed to climate policy based on targets that might constrain their ability to reach their sustainable development goals.

At the same time, many developing countries have an important and growing impact on world emissions. The solutions they find to their development challenges will profoundly affect the climate in the decades to come.

The good news is that in many cases the most effective ways of addressing the sustainable development goals are also those that provide major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In most cases, these SDPAMs do not need to be based on emission limits or on a price of carbon—they can be aimed directly and wholly at meeting the sustainable development goals of the host country.

WRI is looking at the potential for such SDPAMs in four countries.

• In India, where the government has set ambitious goals for providing electricity to the rural poor, we believe that off-grid renewables offer faster delivery, better access to investment capital, and greater energy security.
• In Brazil, the biofuels program has saved the country $100 billion in external debt—a fact that makes such fuels attractive in many countries.
• In China, the promotion of vehicles that are both more efficient and have smaller “footprints” has the potential to address both energy security concerns and infrastructure constraints in a fast-growing economy.
• And in South Africa we are examining the extent to which implementing carbon capture and storage technology brings benefits in terms of technology transfer.