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Compliance: Critical to Successful Standards and Labeling Policies
Countries can only realize the benefits of efficient and clean cooling technologies if there are systems in place to effectively implement and enforce cooling policy.
Setting ambitious cooling standards in Southeast Asia and Africa will help curb the energy and environmental impacts from air conditioning, transform markets, and improve lives. Throughout 2018, CLASP focused on supporting and strengthening regional and national compliance programs in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Lower Mekong region, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
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2 out of 15 ECOWAS Member States run full compliance programs. 4 out of 10 ASEAN Member States run full compliance programs. There are 5 ASEAN states with national compliance efforts supported by CLASP.
Strategic compliance frameworks are critical to safeguard benefits of appliance energy efficiency policy including projected energy savings and CO2 emissions reductions. They also protect consumers, and create a fair playing field for suppliers of efficient and highquality products.
Robust, cost-effective compliance frameworks protect markets from products that do not meet national standards by preventing low quality products from entering the market or removing them from the market through three key steps:
1. Conformity Assessment involves evaluating products before market entry through product testing, certification, registration of compliant products in national or regional databases, and checking that imported products comply with national requirements at customs.
2. Market Surveillance helps identify non-compliant products on the market through in-store and online monitoring of products and their labels, verification testing to prove (non-)compliance, and reporting of test results.
3. Enforcement corrects and discourages noncompliance, by assessing the severity of cases, taking appropriate and proportionate enforcement action, and communicating as needed to deter future offenses.
