CDM Programme of Activities (PoA) may open doors for inclusive business: reasonable solutions are at hand
PoA has been introduced in 2007 as a new mechanism under CDM to allow for smaller projects to benefit from the carbon market. In a PoA, individual small CDM activities can be bundled. For example, a large food producer in Brazil coordinates with over 3,500 small business owners to process pig waste into organic fertilizer, fish food, and useable energy.
In their recent article “Every Little Bit Helps” in D+C magazine, Nicola Ursina Blum, Anna Santa Cruz, and Christina Gradl, discusses the potential of the PoA for inclusive business. In their interviews with 12 leading experts, the authors find that many challenges stand in the way of the PoA reaching full potential. Measuring emissions savings with small distributed projects can be extremely burdensome, for example, and bureaucracy and upfront costs are still extensive. Simple standards could reduce control costs and enable early revenues. Thus, the authors argue, reasonable solutions are at hand to set free the potential of the PoA as a tool for poverty alleviation.