یک روش چند معیاری برای شناسایی فرصت های سرمایه گذاری برای بهره برداری از مکانیزم توسعه پاک

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the prospects for the exploitation of the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in Greece. The paper is addressing 3 questions: in which country, what kind of investment, with which economic and environmental return? The proposed approach is based on a multicriteria analysis for identifying priority countries and interesting investment opportunities in each priority country. These opportunities are then evaluated through a conventional financial analysis in order to assess their economic and environmental attractiveness. To this purpose, the IRR of a typical project in each investment category is calculated by taking into account country-specific parameters, such as baseline emission factors, load factors, costs, energy prices etc. The results reveal substantial differences in the economic and environmental return of different types of projects in different host-countries and show that for the full exploitation of the CDM a multifaceted approach to decision-making is necessary.

According to the Kyoto Protocol (KP), the industrialized countries (Annex-I countries) have committed themselves to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) to the amounts agreed under article 3. In order to meet their commitment in the most cost-effective way and taking into consideration that the location of emission reduction is practically non-important, KP provides a co-operative framework giving to Annex-I countries the possibility to reach part of their target through the so-called flexible mechanisms: Emissions Trading, Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). In the case of CDM, article 12 of the KP provides that any Annex I country or any licensee legal entity of Annex I country is allowed to be credited for emissions reductions achieved by investing in projects located in developing (non-Annex I) countries, thus profiting from the lower abatement costs in the host-country. Moreover, the CDM is intended to support the sustainable development of host-countries, since Annex-I countries are expected to contribute with financial resources and technology transfer in the realization of projects that would not have been implemented without the incentive of gaining tradable certified emission reductions (CERs) (UNFCCC, 2001). In the framework of the KP and the burden-sharing agreement within the European Union (EU), Greece is committed to retain the increase of GHG for the period 2008–12 up to 25% compared to the 1990 level. Emissions inventories and existing augmentative trends (approximately 23.2% by 2003) show that current policies are not enough for complying with this limit without additional measures and recourse to the KP flexible mechanisms. This paper is addressing 3 questions related with the exploitation of the CDM: In which country to invest? What kind of project to realize? Which could be the environmental and economic return of the investment? In the literature there are already some answers to each single question separately: for example, the CDM market potential is explored in Halsnæs (2002), Jotzo and Michaelowa (2002), Zhao and Michaelowa (2005) for indicating promising markets worldwide; the conformity of different projects to the CDM is examined principally with respect to investment additionality in order to check that the mechanism is not going to subsidize viable projects (Greiner and Michaelowa, 2003; Shrestha and Timilsina, 2002); finally, the attractiveness of individual investment projects has been estimated in several studies focusing mainly on the procedure followed to establish the baseline scenario and subsequently the amount of CERs to be accredited (CDMWatch, 2005; Parkinson et al., 2001; Shrestha and Shrestha, 2002; Zhao and Michaelowa, 2005). The present paper proposes an integrated approach to address all these issues from the perspective of an Annex-I country, seeking to identify the practically exploitable CDM potential and to pick up the most attractive investment opportunities. The developed screening approach is implemented in Greece and includes 3 interrelated steps based on the combined exploitation of multiple criteria decision analysis and traditional financial analysis. In the 1st step, a number of pre-selected candidate host-countries are evaluated by taking into account criteria reflecting their economic and geographical association with the investing country and their suitability to host development projects. In the 2nd step, candidate projects in each country are evaluated on the basis of techno-economic and legislative criteria, while the most highly ranked projects are evaluated in the 3rd step through a conventional financial analysis that takes into account the revenues raised by the expected CERs. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 includes a short description of the applied methodology with emphasis on the multicriteria method used, Section 3 presents the evaluation criteria and the obtained ranking of candidate host-countries, Section 4 the evaluation criteria and the obtained prioritization of candidate projects in each priority country, while Section 5 presents the parameters used and the results of the financial analysis. The main findings and the conclusions drawn are included in Section 6.

The present paper presents an integrated approach for assessing the prospects and opportunities induced from the exploitation of the flexible mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol. The developed approach is implemented from the perspective of Greek interests and is focusing on the Clean Development Mechanism by examining a number of non Annex-I countries where Greek enterprises are more likely to be activated. The analysis proceeds to a step-wise multicriteria screening procedure by which the most promising investment opportunities in the most advantageous host-countries are hierarchically ordered and can be further evaluated through a detailed financial assessment followed by sensitivity analysis. The obtained results show that the electricity generation sector offers quite promising investment opportunities for Greek interests. Especially, with the support provided by CDM, power units’ modernization represents very attractive investment opportunities in most of the examined countries. Wind energy can also be exploited at very satisfactory rates in Armenia, while hydro projects may be viable only under very favorable circumstances. The performed sensitivity analysis shows that among the several uncertain parameters, the value of CERs in the carbon market and the baseline emission factor, have a relatively minor impact on the project's profitability. On the contrary, load factors, electricity tariffs and investment costs—thus the major parameters of financial return outside the CDM—appear as the most crucial factors for the realization and viability of the projects. In addition to the numerical findings, the paper was intended to highlight the significance of the Clean Development Mechanism of the KP, the key-issues that should be taken into account for the identification of promising CDM markets, and also to illustrate the usefulness of multicriteria analysis as a decision support tool in relevant investment decisions.