Name: Jermaine Descartes
Affiliation: Department of Sustainable Development- Saint Lucia
Journal Title: Daily Journal Entry 5
Date: August 9, 2022


Today, lecture began promptly at 9:00am. The day began with the continuation of the Lecture on the Waste Sector by Dr. Seungdo Kim. We got to learn first- hand of Solid Waste Management in Korea. The three divers for waste in the country are natural conditions (limited treatment of landfill wastes), social conditions (high generation of solid waste per area) and economic conditions (high generation of solid waste by industries). To tackle Solid Waste, Korea has progressively implemented various Acts and Policies and associated actions in three developmental stages. These stages include: Sanitary Treatment (1st Stage), Recycling (2nd Stage) and Resource Circulation (3rd Stage). Korea’s ultimate goal is to achieve Zero Waste through the implementation of Resource Circulation and Waste to Energy efforts.


Final Lecture with Dr. Seungdo Kim

The afternoon sessions focused on the Energy Sector. I was most looking forward to discussions on this Sector as it accounts for the most GHG emissions in Saint Lucia. Although, the first Lecture: “Energy Sector: GHG emission MRV Methodology” had rich content, more time should have been allocated to adequately cover the content being presented and to allow trainees to grasp the concepts. I was not able to grasp everything; nonetheless, I did glean key messages from the lecture. The Energy Sector is categorized into fuel combustion, fugitive emissions and transport and storage of Carbon Dioxide (CCS). Each of these have their own methodologies for estimating GHG emissions based of activity data and Emission Factors (which we went through). We also learned of the reference and sectoral approaches for calculating GHG emissions. At the end of the lecture, Mr. Gyu Kim stressed that transparency and documentation are the most important characteristics for national inventories.


Lecture with Mr. Gyu Kim

Following this, we had a lecture focusing on the basics of Carbon Market Development & Emissions Trade System with a focus on the EU and Korea. This topic was particularly new to me, but it was rather interesting. I learned that carbon pricing is an approach to reduce carbon emissions that uses market mechanisms to pass the cost to emitters. Its main aim is to protect the environment through discouraging the use of carbon emitting fossil fuels. There are several ETS around the word, with the EU being the most established and China the largest. Most of these cover emissions from power and industry. However, other sectors are included as well, especially in Korea. One of the key elements of the ETS is cap setting which can be done via top down or bottom-up approaches. Other key elements include allocation, monitoring reporting and verification and market stability mechanism. It would be interesting to learn more about this area and how its principles can be applied to the Caribbean context.


Final Lecture of the Day with Mr. Alistair Ritchie




Coordinator's comments:
We were lucky to have Mr. Gyu Kim to deliver the lecture on the energy sector, but not lucky enough to have a longer session with more detailed explanation. I too consider that it would have been more helpful if the energy session was longer. Though it only lasted for 2 hours, I hope the lecture covered the essence of the sector which included calculation of emissions in the most accurate and transparency way.
I am glad to know that you find the ETS lecture by Mr. Ritchie interesting which extended to the possible applicability to your region. Since we continued to focus on the inventory for the past two weeks, ETS was another great topic to learn as a mean (or mechanism) for mitigation action apart from emission calculations and methodologies. Hope it was a refreshing and another useful lecture to you.