Estudio de indicadores económicos y medio ambientales para la viabilidad de los Mecanismos de Desarrollo Limpio en Latinoamérica

Resumen

Reports such as the European Environment Agency (EEA) entitled Climate Change Impacts in Europe and the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 gathered ample evidence that climate change is a fact and that its effects are spacious, many of them with significant economic costs, both for people and ecosystems around the globe. The two reports mentioned and other researches cited in this study also ensure that the current changes do not respond to natural variations and consider the human activities responsible for global warming in recent decades. Under article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations as an important mitigation tool against climate change, Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) can be considered as a real opportunity for developing countries to achieve the benefits of the carbon market emerging through the investment of foreign capital from developed countries and international transfers of clean technology, which contribute to sustainable development, in return for developed countries to meet part of their commitments to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions efficiently and effectively. In many cases the host countries of these projects require an environmental impact study as a condition for approval, but the only socioeconomic criteria taken into account is the absence of negative socioeconomic impacts on the area of influence. Consider that this criterion is insufficient to ensure a full contribution to sustainable development and, in some cases, can not even say that there are not negative economic impacts are occurring due to the lack of systems to evaluate its impact. Currently, there is the main objective of the CDM is the reduction of GHG, which means that the contribution to the sustainability of the host country does not seem justified. This need gave rise to the idea of creating a tool that could contribute to the evaluation of CDM projects. Thus, in order to provide an option for the assessment of CDM projects through an assessment easier and more consistent with the objective of defining the flexibility mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol, it was decided to develop a synthetic index, the Sustainable Development Project Index (IDSP). The IDSP is obtained from three compounds or synthetic indicators representing the environmental, economic and social contribution of the CDM project to sustainable development, and it was intended to quantitatively measure this contribution to the region where the project will carry out . The simplification suggested for the index aims to provide a numerical simple and easy identification that can represent the viability or not of the CDM project under evaluation.