Inter-sectoral prioritization of climate technologies: insights from a Technology Needs Assessment for mitigation in Brazil

Abstract

Technological development is key for national strategies to cope with the Paris Agreement’s goals. Technology Needs Assessments (TNAs) aim to identify, prioritize, and diffuse climate change mitigation and/or adaptation technologies in developing countries. Their methodology includes a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) framework but, although many countries already conducted a TNA, literature lacks discussions on country-specific processes for a TNA, as it usually follows a one-size-fits-all approach. This paper provides empirical evidence on the importance of country-driven processes that help shaping international programmes into country-specific needs and capabilities. It presents lessons learned from a tailored process for identification, prioritization, and selection of mitigation technologies in the scope of a TNA project for Brazil, an exceptional case of a developing country with strong capacity in integrated assessment modelling (IAM) scenarios for guiding its climate strategies. A previous IAM scenario result allowed pre-selecting technologies in six key economic sectors, while other TNAs prioritized no more than three. This allowed the elaboration of an overall ranking from the MCDA, in contrast to sectoral rankings that are mostly employed in other countries’ TNAs. The overall ranking serves not only as a basis for the selection of priority technologies but also provides information on the integrated innovations framework for climate technologies in the country. Further specific findings of the tailored Brazilian TNA approach are discussed in the paper in order to call for the importance that a technology transfer project should not only be country-driven but also conducted through a country-specific process. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11027-022-10025-6.

The Role of Cities: Linking Integrated Assessment Models to Urban Solutions

“…The results of the projections were used for the elaboration of four impact indicators: emission mitigation potential, the level of economic activity, the level of employment, and the level of local competitiveness. For each indicator, solutions were classified following the structure developed in [14]. We then used the indicators to rank solutions to help decision makers.…”

“…We used BLUES-EFES modeling results as the basis (in terms of the deviation between the baseline and COP26 scenarios) of classifying the indicators of mitigation potential, and the levels of economic activity, employment, and local competitiveness. The results, which represent a quantitative approach, were inserted into a scale of the degree of impact ranging from 1 (very low) to 5 (very high) on the basis of [14]. The impact degrees assigned to each indicator represent the level of the contribution of each solution concerning economic and mitigation criteria (Table 1).…”