Credit: UNDP

Newly released set of tools to help assess the impact of national climate policies and actions

As 2020 is the year countries are expected to update their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the release of a new series of policy assessment guides to help countries assess the impact of their climate policies and actions and improve their capacity to strengthen and achieve their national climate goals comes at an opportune time. 

After almost 24 months of piloting, the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT) has deployed a series of policy assessment guides to help countries assess the impact of their climate policies and actions and improve their capacity to strengthen and achieve their national climate goals.

The ICAT Policy Assessment Guides provide governments and other users with the means to assess how national policies and actions impact their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and their sustainable development objectives. They also allow to assess their transformational change potential. This approach of looking beyond GHG emissions, linking climate policies to a country’s domestic policy reality and engaging subnational and non-state actors, is particularly valuable for anchoring policies within national development priorities.

As 2020 is the year countries are expected to update their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the Guides can improve policy design and implementation, inform goal setting such as for NDCs, track progress towards these goals, provide information for reporting, and generate data to help attract finance to support their actions.

The series of ICAT Assessment Guides are an easy-to-use set of methodologies. They were designed to be used by policymakers and technical experts in combination or separately and include templates and real examples from partner countries to facilitate their application.

The final version of the Guides resulted from an extensive three-year process implementing the Guides in over 20 countries. The Guides were developed by technical experts and working groups and went through two thorough rounds of public consultations to ensure that they could be practically and easily implemented by countries.