While Africa is contributing negligibly to the climate change, with just about 2% to 3% of global emissions, it stands out disproportionately as the most vulnerable region in the world, with multiple open sustainability fronts. To this end, the HORIZON Europe IAM COMPACT travelled to Kenya’s Mombasa, where a 4-day capacity-building workshop was organised on Modelling Tools for Sustainable Development, from August 29th to September 1st 2023.
The workshop, hosted by Renewable Energy and Climate Change Research Centre (RECCReC) at the Technical University of Mombasa (TUM), in collaboration Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), was split into three different sessions, each one targeting a different stakeholder group: university students, policymakers and other stakeholders. The aim was to forward in-house modelling capacity base at academic and government level, touching on pivotal aspects and giving hands-on trainings to the modelling tools used to support integrated (energy, food, water supply) policy planning, including an advanced understanding of climate-ecosystem interactions.
The students’ workshop, that took place on 29-30 August, kicked-off with an introduction to energy system modelling, covering a brief history of energy modelling and basic aspects of Energy Optimisation Models (reference energy system, classification, resolution, etc.). This introductory workshop was the first step towards building a team of students, who will develop an open-access model for integrated policy planning in Kenya using the CLEWs (Climate, Land, Energy, Water) nexus framework in the context of the IAM COMPACT project. Participants engaged in hands-on activities and discussed about the development of local model applications for national policy support.
The capacity building exercises continued with the workshops targeting policymakers’ and other stakeholders’ groups that took place the next days. The aim was to demonstrate empirically the use of IAM-based models in climate policy planning taking into account local opportunities, challenges and development priorities. Discussions were also backed by UK’s Climate Compatible Growth (CCG) Programme, which is highly active in Kenya. The workshop ended with a hands-on exercise, using the CLEWs interface of the United Nations as a tool to explore interlinkages among water, energy, land use, and water and transpose inputs into nationally relevant modelling assumptions and scenarios.
The workshop ended with a hands-on exercise, using the CLEWs interface as a tool to inform debates on sustainable development policies and the interlinkages among climate, land, energy and water.
Read the Press Release here.
For more information about IAM COMPACT visit the project’s website!