Capacity Building in West Africa – training on the GBEP sustainability indicators in Togo and Ghana

Capacity Building in West Africa – training on the GBEP sustainability indicators in Togo and Ghana

Modern bioenergy production and use can play a key role in the diversification and de-carbonization of energy systems, while improving access to modern energy services, especially in rural areas of developing countries. This is especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to modern energy services is low. Modern bioenergy development can also boost both agricultural and rural development, by raising agricultural productivity and creating new employment and income-generating opportunities, among other things. Modern bioenergy, therefore, represents a flexible solution to the transition to renewable energy. However, if not properly managed, bioenergy development may trigger a number of negative environmental and socio-economic impacts.

The GBEP sustainability indicators can be used at the national level to assess and monitor the environmental, social and economic impacts of bioenergy production and use, the results of which can be used to guide sound policy development. The recent project funded by GIZ in Togo and Ghana, in collaboration with ECREEE, aimed to build or enhance existing capacities of local stakeholders in both countries to understand, assess and implement the GBEP sustainability indicators and use them to inform bioenergy policy decision making. The ECOWAS region continues to be an attractive location for biofuel project development. Most stakeholders in the region on the other hand lack the basic tools to assess bioenergy projects. The GBEP sustainability indicators provide a tool to define a sustainable bioenergy baseline useful for such projects and to increase capacities of selected countries for sound bioenergy development.

In both countries, workshops and trainings were carried out by FAO staff with experience of the implementation of the GBEP sustainability indicators. In a participatory process, the local stakeholders identified the most pertinent bioenergy pathways in the country and also the most relevant indicators for their measurement, given the national context. For both nations, wood energy forms a large percentage of the primary energy production and is relied upon by many households for cooking and heating. Therefore, the project focused on a set of indicators most adapted to assess the sustainability of the wood energy value chain in the context of Forest Landscape Restoration (AFR100) targets.

It is hoped that this capacity building will pave the way for projects that can fully implement the GBEP sustainability indicators in Togo and Ghana, thus enabling informed policy decisions on the development of the national bioenergy development. The themes investigated in the project were presented at the Global Landscape Forum (December 2018) in order to disseminate the important links between wood energy and forest landscape restoration. The results of this project have been praised by both countries for the awareness raised on the importance of the bioenergy sector for achieving other objectives, such as forest landscape restoration, commitments under the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. The project partner, ECREEE, sees this awareness raising as key for translating the ECOWAS Regional Bioenergy Policy into well-grounded, sustainable strategies at the national level, and is keen to replicate the workshop and training activities in more countries in the region in the future.

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