Building capacity to support countries fulfil reporting requirements
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) just concluded the inception phase of a new project aimed at helping countries to overcome the challenges posed by the reporting requirements under the Paris Agreement, with focus on the agriculture sectors.
A key element of the Paris Agreement is the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) that requires countries to establish robust measuring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems and to communicate their efforts to the UNFCCC. However, implementing a new reporting framework comes with several challenges. In response to a request of support from UNFCCC parties, the Global Environmental Facility established the Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency (CBIT) fund to support developing countries to fulfil their reporting obligations.
Being a GEF implementing agency, FAO is already supporting several countries to access CBIT funds to design national projects related to agriculture sectors. To support countries efforts, FAO, through the Mitigation of Climate Change in Agriculture (MICCA) Programme, is also implementing the “Global capacity-building towards enhanced transparency in the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector” project, which will serve as an umbrella for the FAO national CBIT-AFOLU projects. In addition to strengthening the institutional arrangements needed to respond to the ETF requirements, the global 1.8 million 3-year project active since January 2019 aims to improve technical capacities of around ten countries to establish systems for MRV and M&E in the AFOLU sector. The project will develop, revise and improve a number of tools, such as the free e-learning series on Building a sustainable national greenhouse gas inventory for AFOLU. It will also focus on knowledge sharing activities and improving the coordination among global transparency initiatives, such as the Partnerships on Transparency of the Paris Agreement (PATPA) and the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT), in order to sustain and scale up institutional and technical capacity in the AFOLU sector.
The project just concluded its inception phase, consisting of three meetings: the first technical advisory group meeting; informal CBIT agencies coordination meeting; and the first project steering committee meeting. The main objective was to raise awareness on the global CBIT-AFOLU project objectives and outputs amongst different stakeholders, such as FAO technical experts, CBIT implementing agencies, relevant institutions and country representatives. Following this phase, the FAO team will organise bilateral discussions and surveys to identify countries’ priorities, in order to set up a workplan for the support needed.
Related resources:
GEF CBIT: https://www.thegef.org/topics/capacity-building-initiative-transparency-cbit
CBIT Global Coordination platform: https://www.cbitplatform.org