NAMA Development for Buildings in South East Asia

The building sector is widely recognized as responsible for approximately one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions and in rapidly developing Asia, the risk of lock-in in high consumption building infrastructure is imminent. Here, energy efficiency measures, enactment of sustainable building policies, technologies, and innovative approaches to financing provide the potential for significant emission reductions. The NAMA Development for Buildings in South East Asia project assisted Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam to

1. recognize the significant mitigation potential of the building sector
2. identify actions and incorporate them in NAMAs
3. identify barriers and navigate them
4. provide MRV tools and bridging the data gap
5. develop financial structures for viable implementation

Further, the project provided a platform for replication of results in China and India through observing partners joining the project throughout.

Project Impacts

In Thailand, the project resulted in the development of two NAMAs, one for energy efficient social housing and one for improving energy efficiency of government buildings. Both NAMAs are submitted to the UNFCCC Registry, the latter seeking funding while the first will be implemented with national funding. In Philippines, another two NAMAs remain under development, one relating to social housing, with focus on solar-PV, and another focusing on municipal pursuit of energy efficiency in public buildings. The NAMA addresses legal barriers in addition to financing models for implementation. In Indonesia, NAMA development became of less priority during project implementation, leaving only one NAMA for further development with the city of Jakarta to improve energy efficiency in the largest buildings in the city. In Vietnam, a concept for solar water heating in hotels was considered, but never materialized in concrete NAMA development. Apart from concrete outputs in the form of NAMA concepts, the project provided significant insights to the barriers for NAMA development in the building sector, one of which is the lack of data. The project developed the Common Carbon Metric (CCM), which provides an easy way of assessing the emissions of a building without access to a lot of measured data, an instrument which is applicable in any building sector context.