The World Bank recently published its third edition of “RISE-Regulatory Indicators for Sustainable Energy”, a global policy report in which it assesses the national policy and regulatory frameworks for sustainable energy across 138 countries, covering as such 98% of the world’s population. The assessment is based on around 31 indicators that average the score of four major pillars, namely access to modern energy, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and clean cooking (scored for only 55 “access-deficit” countries). All indicators are equally weighted and are assigned scores ranging between 0 and 100, and countries are accordingly classified in each of the aforementioned pillars under three traffic light colors (green, yellow, and red), representing their level of advancement in the concerned pillar, as follows:

• Green: Score of 67 to 100 – “relatively mature policy environment”;
• Yellow: Score of 34 to 66 – “serious efforts” have been launched “to develop a policy framework”;
• Red: Score 0 to 33 – “policy adoption remains at an early stage”.

According to the report, some adjustments were made to refine the indicators and sub indicators of all the pillars for all countries in order to better reflect the changes in the energy sector and accordingly, the results of the RISE 2020 report cannot be directly compared to results from the previous editions.

In this vein, the report shows a modest improvement in the adoption of advanced policy frameworks geared towards fostering sustainable energy across the globe, with the number of countries implementing such frameworks increasing from 57 in 2017 to 65 in 2019. The report noted in this respect that the improvement in the global average score came at a slower pace when compared to the 2015-2017 results. Despite said progress, the world remains halfway through the necessary policy journey and is unlikely to meet the required RISE score to fall under the advanced stage (i.e. green) category before 2025. In fact, the world’s overall average RISE score stood at 48 in 2019, hence in the yellow zone. From another standpoint, the report noted that all regions saw some progress in terms of policy & regulatory frameworks during the 2017-2019 period but at an uneven pace. More specifically, the report stated that most OECD countries have shown advanced policy frameworks (green), while almost half of Sub-Saharan Africa’s countries have underdeveloped policy frameworks (red). Furthermore, the report highlighted that Sub-Saharan Africa recorded the largest improvement in RISE scores over the concerned period, with nine out of ten fastest improving countries in terms of RISE scores coming from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Delving further into details, Germany and the United Kingdom emerged as the world’s leading countries in the policy framework for sustainable energy with an overall RISE score of 95, followed by Denmark (overall score: 94), Republic of Korea (overall score: 92), and each of Hungary, Ireland & Italy (overall score: 91 each), only to name a few. Locally, Lebanon’s RISE score reached 71 (green zone) in 2019. More particularly, Lebanon scored 100 (green zone) in access to modern energy, 47 (green zone) in energy efficiency, and 67 (green zone) in the renewable energy component.