Topic: technology

WRI’s Bottom Line series provides brief answers, along with recommendations for additional resources, for questions at the forefront of climate and energy policy debates. These two-page fact sheets, informed by WRI’s experience working with businesses to address the challenges of climate change, can help companies, policymakers, and other stakeholders stay informed on important policy concepts.

Technology is one of the four “pillars” of a post- 2012 climate policy laid out in the Bali Action Plan (BAP). In practice a multilateral climate agreement will not be the primary driver of clean technology development, deployment, and transfer. But given the central importance of this issue in the BAP, the provisions for technology in the evolving climate agreement will have a major bearing on the success of negotiations. Designed correctly, they may also play an important complementary role in facilitating the adoption of clean technologies.

This paper reviews Party submissions to the UNFCCC and identifies emerging areas of consensus and debate that may offer constructive grounds for negotiations going forward. The paper explores how an international agreement might facilitate and encourage a range of technology cooperation efforts by channeling funding, providing a forum for capacity building and learning exchange, and creating a framework for measuring, reporting, and verifying support and actions.

This report examines Concentrating Solar Thermal power (CST), a renewable energy resource that presents policy-makers and investors with a significant potential for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector.