How to assess policy impact in national energy and climate plans

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openAccess

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Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2021-01-01

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Mcode

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Language

en

Pages

17
405-421

Series

Environmental and Climate Technologies, Volume 25, issue 1

Abstract

It is the responsibility of each member state of the European Union, to prepare a national energy and climate plan and set achievable climate targets and meaningful measures and policies to achieve the targets set. Annex 4 of the Latvian National Energy and Climate Plan for 2030 (hereinafter - NECP) provides an overview of policies and measures to achieve the climate targets. The NECP does not provide information on the impact of the policies or which measures are more important and which are less crucial Similarly, the measures in Annex 4 of the NECP were not determined by industry experts but by ministry officials, therefore, it is not clear whether the proposed measures will achieve the set climate targets, a point also made by European Commission in its evaluation report on NECP. The aim of the study is to develop a tool for the early assessment of the impact of energy and climate policy measures. The study developed a methodology to pre-assess the impacts of the policies identified in the NECP, impacts were described by measures effectiveness and stage of development. With this methodology, it is possible to assess the impact of energy policies using indicators to characterize the effectiveness of the policy and the level of development. The study confirmed that both the multi-criteria analysis and composite index method can be used as methods. The results showed that high impact measures were related to the promotion of energy efficiency in buildings, but low impact measures were comprehensive horizontal measures such as measures related principle 'energy efficiency first' and review of energy efficiency obligation schemes. The indicators with the highest impact on sustainability rate were possible side effects and transparency of policies.

Description

Funding Information: This research was funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project 'Blind spots in the energy transition policy (BlindSpots)', project No. lzp-2018/2-0022. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Lauma Balode, Kristiāna Dolge, Peter D. Lund, Dagnija Blumberga. This is an open access article licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).

Keywords

Composite sustainability index, Energy and climate plans, Energy policies, Impact assessment, Multi-criteria decision method

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Citation

Balode, L, Dolge, K, Lund, P D & Blumberga, D 2021, ' How to assess policy impact in national energy and climate plans ', Environmental and Climate Technologies, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 405-421 . https://doi.org/10.2478/rtuect-2021-0030