De-Carbonizing Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Results derived in DeCaDe can inform different stakeholders how to identify and address current challenges: First, African governments can learn how to improve their NDCs in the upcoming UNFCCC periodic review process; in particular, they will help to understand which policy instruments can be implemented, how this can be politically backed and how they can be made effective. Multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank or African Development Bank, and bilateral donors (e.g. BMZ) can use our results to identify key areas of future action. In addition, our results can also inform a broad range of policy makers how different – and potentially conflicting – goals in the Agenda 2030 can be managed. Academically, we will partially step on empirically uncovered ground.

The evaluation of distributional effects by energy price changes on households will rely partly on ex-ante micro-simulations to determine how different income groups are likely to be affected by climate measures. In particular, the results will provide information on whether a climate policy can be expected to be progressive or regressive, i.e. whether it will put a proportionally higher cost burden on richer or poorer households. The distributional impacts can also be analyzed along other socio-economic characteristics, such as household size, location, education etc. Ex-post evaluations of fossil fuel subsidy reforms will shed light on behavioral recations of households in response to energy price increases.