This report was written in a collaboration between the Government of St. Lucia, the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) and the University of Oxford-led Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC). The report examines the possible vision for the island’s future infrastructure aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change. this report equips Saint Lucia with a robust approach to infrastructure planning that can ensure that social, economic, and environmental needs are met in a range of future scenarios. Through extensive data collection and cross-sectoral analysis, this report estimates Saint Lucia’s future infrastructure needs for...
This paper reviews recent developments in biofuel markets and their economic, social and environmental impacts. Several countries have introduced mandates and targets for biofuel expansion. Production, international trade and investment have increased sharply in the past few years. However, several existing studies have blamed biofuels as one of the key factors behind the 2007-2008 global food crisis, although the magnitudes of impacts in these studies vary widely depending on the underlying assumptions and structure of the models. Existing studies also have huge disparities in the magnitude of long-term impacts of biofuels on food prices and supply; studies that model only...
The project “Regional potential assessment of novel bio energy crops in fifteen ECOWAS countries” was started by the different project partners based on the need to make an overall assessment of a series of novel potential bio energy crops which can or could be grown and processed in the future in the 15 ECOWAS countries. This project fits in a broader strategic analysis of alternative energy needs and production, the key mandate of the main funding partner in the project, ECREEE. The project partners deliberately excluded conventional “bio energy” crops like sugarcane, oil palm, maize or sunflower as target crops,...
Key Words: CARICOM, renewable energy, solar PV, wind, energy efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions