Tunisia makes progress towards NDC implementation in the building sector

Tunisia’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) aims to reduce carbon intensity of the country’s GDP by 41% by 2030 compared to 2010. Tunisia plans to achieve this target principally through five Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs): forestry, cement, electricity, sanitation, and buildings. The energy sector will be the main contributor to realise the objective: 68% of the mitigation potential is set to come from energy efficiency and 32% from renewable energy actions. Tunisia identified three priority NAMAs in the energy sector: the Tunisian Solar Plan NAMA, the Building NAMA and the cement NAMA.

In March 2017, Tunisia obtained support from the NAMA Facility to enter the Detailed Preparation Phase of the support project for the Building NAMA “Scaling-up Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency in the Building Sector”. This represents a milestone in Tunisia’s efforts to implement its NDC and reduce the carbon footprint of the building sector. The sector’s energy consumption is nearly a quarter of the national energy demand and will most likely keep increasing, reaching 35% by 2030.

Since 2005, Tunisia has been working to reduce the building sector’s carbon footprint through three programmes: PROSOL to promote the use of solar water heaters, PROSOL ELEC to support installations of rooftop photovoltaic systems (PV) in residential buildings and PROMO ISOL to increase thermal performance (not yet launched). Despite the relentless efforts, the government is facing financial and technical barriers to scale up the programmes.

The Building NAMA seeks to address those barriers and aims to increase the uptake of energy efficiency and renewable energy measures across the sector by scaling-up PROSOL and PROSOL ELEC and by launching PROMO ISOL. The NAMA support project will specifically focus on:

  • Restructuring PROSOL ELEC’s financial mechanism to mitigate the risks faced by investors and support households’ purchases of PV.
  • Developing the legal and regulatory framework for all three programmes.
  • Raising awareness among stakeholders to enable the transformation for the renewable energy and energy efficiency in Tunisia

 By implementing the NAMA, support project, Tunisia will install 134 MW of PV in the building sector and avoid close to 400k tCO2e by 2023.

 The NAMA proposal was developed by Ecofys, a Navigant company, and Alcor for the Tunisian Agency for Energy Conservation (ANME), financed by the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German government. GIZ is accompanying ANME and the Tunisian Ministry of Energy in the NAMA Facility process.