INVESTIGATING CHALLENGES FACING IMPLEMENTATION OF CLEAN DEVELOPMENT MECHANISM PROJECTS AT KENYA ELECTRICITY GENERATING COMPANY

Abstract

Climate change has become the biggest global environmental challenge. The International community acknowledged it as a global concern with the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992. The clean development mechanism (CDM) was established under the UNFCCC as one of the mechanisms to achieve sustainable development while reducing emissions. African countries unfortunately have not benefited from CDM with only 2.4% of the projects registered and only one country Egypt contributing 0.8% from amongst the nine countries contributing 93.6% of the issued carbon credits. The objective of this study was to determine the challenges affecting implementation of CDM projects at KenGen which is a major player of CDM process in Kenya. The study findings demonstrate that there were low awareness levels among key persons in relation to KenGen’s CDM implementation requirements. The study further identified complex and tedious CDM procedures, lack of adequate internal capacity and the long approval process as the main challenges at the development stage of KenGen CDM projects. The Chi –Square test shows a statistic of 38.32 with an associated p of 0.001 (P<0.05). The P value of 0.001 is statistically significant in explaining the influence of the organizational constraints, rules and procedures and level of awareness on implementation of CDM Projects considering that the P-value is less than 0.05 at the 95% level of confidence. In conclusion the study found that the implementation of CDM at KenGen is influenced by organizational constraints, rules and procedures and level of awareness. It’s expected that the results from this study will contribute towards fast tracking the development of CDM projects at KenGen as well as enabling the company to benefit from the global initiatives geared towards sustainable development.