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Climate Finance Support to Address Carbon Emissions in the Pacific Alliance and West Africa
Relevance, Effectiveness and Alignment of Domestic Climate MRV Systems
Across two regions exceptionally vulnerable to climate change, the Pacific Alliance (PA) and West Africa (WA) MRV bilateral programmes support nations to strengthen climate measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) and to transform development policies to align climate targets with investments to create wealth, reduce energy poverty, enhance social conditions and address the impacts of climate change and air pollution. Fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and enabling South-South partnerships is a fundamental part of this approach.
While the nations’ NDC commitments to meet the Paris Agreement are undoubtedly ambitious, they require a profound transformation of the current trends in energy and carbon emission intensification. Each nation must address their own unique, particular challenges and sovereign development priorities to redirect this pathway.
Towards this goal, the PA-MRV and WA-MRV programmes have been supporting a range of innovative and self-driven activities intended to strengthen the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and alignment of climate MRV systems for GHG & short-lived climate pollutant (SLCP) emissions inventories, mitigation actions and climate finance.
PROGRAMME GOALS
- Increase awareness and familiarization of climate targets, policies, and the status of climate MRV systems within each nation;
- Discuss the challenges, synergies and opportunities to improve climate MRV systems;
- Support sovereign approaches to strengthen institutional arrangements and climate governance structures in participating countries;
- Enable South-South cooperation across West Africa and the Pacific Alliance; and,
- Share experience of Canada’s sectoral projects in response to regional MRV priorities.
KEY DEFINITIONS
Effective means that climate MRV explicitly improves local decision making, policy formulation and infrastructure investments towards achieving the NDC.
Efficient refers to the level of inputs and investments required to achieve the effective impact. Efficiency is the “effectiveness” relative to the inputs invested. Efficiency allows for a greater magnitude of impacts, with swifter decision making and rapidly scalable investments.
“The lack of harmonization between infrastructure investments and climate goals in many projects in the region needs to be corrected. Creating effective national climate MRV systems will build the necessary trust and send clear signals to both civil society and the private sector, so that ambitious projects can be carried forward. He stressed to the country participants to “take ownership” of the climate MRV process, and design and implement efficient systems that are useful to their countries. This would also have the effect of strengthening climate governance in all nations.”
Mr. François KOUABLAN—
Directeur de Cabinet, Ministère de l’Environnement et du Développement Durable,
Côte d’Ivoire
Summary of Opening Remarks
Regional Technical Consultation, Abidjan, March 2020
KEY CONCEPTS
The MRV of mitigation actions is concerned with tracking implementation, and accurately assessing, the impacts of GHG mitigation projects on national climate emission trends and targets. Ideally, this process also includes assessing the impacts of emission mitigation actions on other non-GHG development goals; namely, changes in economic, social or other environmental conditions; such as employment, income levels, attracting additional private sector investments, air pollution, health benefits, social equity, biodiversity and other sustainability goals.
During various national consultations with key stakeholders, it was observed that a common definition of climate finance is elusive. Nonetheless, significant increases in all forms of climate finance are fundamental to achieve the rapid and profound transformations necessary for NDC achievement. Strong MRV of all forms of climate finance is not only critically important to stimulate the actual design, launch and operation of transformative domestic projects and low-carbon infrastructure— but is also a precursor to determining the additional support needed (technical, financial) for achieving “conditional” NDC targets” as well as understanding what role the international transfer of mitigation outcomes could play in supporting nations to achieve their most difficult and ambitious mitigation activities.
The inception of several National Climate MRV Communities of Practice across the region (with the keen participation of sectoral ministries, civil society organizations, research institutions and universities) demonstrates the high interest in Climate MRV beyond simple compliance with international reporting obligations.
In particular, these discussions have highlighted the demand to improve domestic information sharing, strengthen institutional arrangements and foster the regular involvement of national universities and research institutions—to gather and analyze data, and support the dissemination of MRV results and implications of trends. This holds great promise for Climate MRV to more effectively inform decision making and support innovative policies to achieve national development objectives across many sectors.
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