Energy Policy http://doi.org/mgx (2013)

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) ventures should boost sustainable development in the host countries. However, available evidence of success in the beneficiary regions is limited, and mostly inconclusive.

CDM projects can affect regional development by creating and/or destroying jobs, both directly — for example to build and maintain a biomass plant instead of a traditional thermal plant — and indirectly, along the supply chain of the plant, for instance. Can Wang of Tsinghua University, China, and co-workers looked at the effects on employment of the 1,384 registered CDM power-sector projects in China, as of 2011. They found that overall the projects generated losses of 99,000 net direct jobs and 3.08 million net indirect gains, resulting in a total of about 2.98 million new jobs compared with the reference scenarios. Solar projects — with the highest number of new indirect jobs created — hold large potential for development. Conversely, hydro projects led to both direct and indirect job losses, and should therefore be implemented with employment compensation mechanisms.