Evaluating the Effectiveness of Japan’s Climate Change Mitigation and Clean Technology Development Policies

Abstract

The energy sector has been the highest contributor of green-house gases (GHG) emission in Japan. To reduce GHG emissions, the development and applications of cleaner technologies sup-ported by effective policies are required. In this study, the effec-tiveness of Japanese government policies related to climate change mitigation especially in the technology development sec-tor was analyzed. To do so, two methodologies; 1) results-based approach (RBA) and 2) case-based approach (CBA) will be com-bined to test the effectiveness of government policies. This com-bination was conducted to fill the missing data required to con-duct the two methodologies. The merging of the two methodolo-gies produced indexes where the proximity of the performance of each policy measured to it would determine its effectiveness. In order to verify the results, the number of projects related to the policy took place over the years was also observed. The results show that the most effective policies were related to the follow-ing technologies: 1) Energy management, 2) Biomass energy pro-duction, and 3) Electric power storage.