CDM Projects under the Kyoto Protocol: A Methodology for Sustainability Assessment – Experiences from South Africa and Uruguay

Under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol, industrialised countries may finance greenhouse gases mitigation projects in developing countries. The Kyoto Protocol explicitly requires that the CDM shall assist developing countries to achieve sustainable development. However, a clear definition of sustainability for CDM projects is still debatable. MATA-CDM (Multi-Attributive Assessment of CDM Projects) is an approach that facilitates a quantitative assessment of potential projects regarding their contribution to sustainable development. This paper presents applications of MATA-CDM in two different countries. In South Africa, the application was done mainly for academic and demonstrative purposes, whereas in Uruguay it was implemented together with the responsible Designated National Authority (DNA). The work in both countries included the selection of sustainability criteria and measurable indicators. Experts weighted the criteria using personal interviews and a multi-stakeholder workshop. This method was applied to three potential CDM projects in South Africa and one in Uruguay. Results show that under the conditions of this study, the MATA-CDM approach yet fails to yield a perfect quantitative overall sustainability assessment of CDM projects but that several findings could be useful to further develop the approach with the aim to translate the vague term sustainable development to a mainstream project level. Valuable experience was in particular collected with different stakeholder processes to perform criteria weighting.