The cooperation between the European Union (EU) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) should be broadened, deepened and become more interactive due to GCC states' accession to the Kyoto protocol in 2005. Nowadays, the GCC states start putting climate change and its business opportunities on the top of their priorities' list towards the accomplishment of the sustainable development goals. However, the level of development of sustainable energy investments (renewable energy, CO2 sequestration and rational use of energy) is low until now in the GCC. For the above reason, the assessment of appropriate investments needs to be taken into account both by the governments in order to design the appropriate framework for supporting them and the project investors to identify the commercially profitable ones. In this framework, the aim of this paper is the identification and assessment of sustainable energy investments in the framework of the EU-GCC co-operation. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.