Web-based Knowledge Center on Market-based Mechanisms for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation for The World Bank’s Partnership for Market Readiness (PMR)

The World Bank - Carbon Finance Unit's Partnership for Market Readiness (PMR) provides financial and technical assistance to enhance countries’ capacity to implement market-based approaches to greenhouse gas mitigation. Within our capacity as student-consultants, the Capstone team was tasked with developing a web-based knowledge center to facilitate information sharing among countries, policymakers and scientists. Additionally, the Capstone team designed a template for the country pages to ensure a consistent layout of information across participating countries and populate the template with research-based knowledge about the country’s experience with market-based approaches to climate change mitigation.

While countries have formally recognized the threat associated with climate change, it is not clear as to how they will collectively address this issue. The public good nature of the environment makes it difficult for governments to overcome some of the collective action problems of climate change. Furthermore, the question of who should take the lead remains unanswered. Concerns about equity have stalled the climate change negotiations and will continue to pose a challenge to international cooperation. Nevertheless, some local initiatives offer a more promising perspective to the progress of climate change negotiations. Individual governments and even companies have pledged millions of dollars for initiatives on energy efficiency, emission reduction and renewable energy. Different countries are at different stages of market readiness and the PMR seeks to provide countries with a platform to share their experiences and help them draw lessons to build market readiness capacity. This has several benefits, including supporting the formulation of low emission development strategies, climate change policies and other mitigation strategies.