By April 2012, the Kyoto Protocol‘s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) registered its 4,000th project. CDM, the emergent market has facilitated numerous clean development projects and at present context, it is registered in 74 countries.
Our neighboring country India aims to attain its certified emission reduction potential of wind energy to 86 billion by 2020. So far Nepal has registered and issued CERs for just two biogas projects under CDM. Biogas Support Program of Nepal has issued 30,203tCO2e and 31,875tCO2e from these two project activities. Few other projects including micro-hydro, landfill gas, safa tempo, light for all, improved cooking stoves etcs in pipeline are still in the validation/registration phase. Due to the unstable political and economic situation securing carbon financing has been a major challenge to Nepal. The absence of proper policy has become an obstacle to continue with a smooth project implementation for carbon credit. In order to compete in the market we need to develop a comprehensive climate change policy.
The awareness of CDM in different sectors is pre-requisite. The projects via wind, biogas, solar, micro hydropower, improved cooking stoves; improved water mills, landfill gas, agriculture, afforestation and reforestation could secure carbon financing and contribute towards the sustainable development of Nepal.
The emission reduction needs to undergo certain steps to be validated as Certified Emission Reduction (CERs). The CDM project cycle step is elaborated below:
Source: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
