Provided guidance to countries that will help in designing and conducting a national mitigation assessment of greenhouse gases. (NB: Unfortunately no longer available online - must be purcahsed in book format).

The book describes guidelines prepared by the U.S. Country Studies Program for the evaluation of options to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. Country Studies Program developed these guidelines in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to provide developing countries and countries with economies in transition with reference materials for national mitigation assessments. Over 50 countries participating in the program used the guidelines, which have been refined to reflect their comments. The guidelines delineate a step-wise methodology for evaluating greenhouse gas mitigation options for the energy and non-energy sectors and describe the applications of common analytical tools.

Under the EERA project (Energy, Ecodevelopment and Resilience in Africa), HELIO International has developed a “Framework for a Smart Energy Path”, which is intended to clarify an approach energy decision-makers can take to ensure their countries’ long-term prosperity and stability. The framework is available in both English and French along with shorter methodology briefs.

• Framework (English)
• Framework (French)
• Methodology in Brief (English)
• Methodology in Brief (French)

Much has been written about the plight of developing Africa and the environmental crisis which underlies it. In many parts of the continent food production lags behind population growth, hunger and famine strike with dreadful persistence, soils are degrading, forests and trees are disappearing at unprecedented rates, and poverty deepens in the countryside and cities.

It is not like this everywhere. Nor are prospects for the future as hopeless as these headlines imply. On the contrary, in many places hard work and creative innovations by people, governments and aid agencies are doing remarkable things to put the land into good shape, increase food production, restore soils and a healthy cover of vegetation, and generally enhance livelihoods on a sustainable basis. How best to support and amplify these efforts has become one of the most urgent and challenging tasks of our times.

This book joins the "literature of hope" rather than of despair by presenting these challenges and the opportunities they offer, while recognizing the problems to be overcome. However, it approaches them from the narrower perspective of energy and the so-called wood.fuel "crisis" of Africa and other parts of the Third World.

In 1992 the IPCC released emission scenarios to be used for driving global circulation models to develop climate change scenarios. The so-called IS92 scenarios were pathbreaking. They were the first global scenarios to provide estimates for the full suite of greenhouse gases. Much has changed since then in our understanding of possible future greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Therefore the IPCC decided in 1996 to develop a new set of emissions scenarios which will provide input to the IPCC Third Assessment Report but can be of broader use than the IS92 scenarios. The new scenarios provide also input for evaluating climatic and environmental consequences of future greenhouse gas emissions and for assessing alternative mitigation and adaptation strategies. They include improved emission baselines and latest information on economic restructuring throughout the world, examine different rates and trends in technological change and expand the range of different economic-development pathways, including narrowing of the income gap between developed and developing countries. To achieve this a new approach was adopted to take into account a wide range of scientific perspectives, and interactions between regions and sectors. Through the so-called "open process"input and feedback from a community of experts much broader than the writing team were solicited. The results of this work show that different social, economic and technological developments have a strong impact on emission trends, without assuming explicit climate policy interventions. The new scenarios provide also important insights about the interlinkages between environmental quality and development choices and will certainly be a useful tool for experts and decision makers.