Taking a Co-benefits Approach in Asia: A Comparative Analysis of Barriers with Recommendations

Abstract

Recognizing actions that can achieve co-benefits – mitigating climate change and meeting other development priorities – as an useful approach to climate mitigation and sustainable development while noting that there have been few studies to date to closely examine barriers in such actions, this chapter studied the barriers and the potential solutions available by comparing 28 case studies from 5 sectors in 10 Asian countries. Findings included that many significant challenges arise at the user level and modest change in behavior or technology can overcome these user-level constraints, that financial and economic barriers are significant in cases involving infrastructure and these financial barriers proved to be surmountable, that governance barriers were important but not all of them were equally important and wider scale institutional issues occurred in policies or attempts to scale up smaller scale actions, and that none of the barriers or possible solutions operates in isolation. Conclusions indicate the potential of international processes and stakeholder engagement to overcome barriers and the usefulness of the notion of social co-benefits.