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Nationally determined contributions (NDCs) are at the heart of the Paris Agreement and embody efforts by each country towards lowering greenhouse gas emissions, pursuing domestic climate change mitigation and adaptation measures and fostering climate resilience.
On 6-7 April, the two-day workshop on NDC implementation gathered together around 90 participants, including government officials, practitioners and experts from EaP six countries, representatives from the European Commission, the UNFCCC, DG CLIMA, DG NEAR, the Energy Community and the World Resources Institute. The workshop, organized within EU4Climate project, that is funded by the EU and implemented by UNDP, intended for the open exchange of countries’ status and submission of NDCs, their experiences, knowledge and good practices in designing and implementing NDCs, integrating gender in them and developing financial plans.
“NDC implementation requires many efforts to deliver the results against adverse climate change impacts timely, mitigation and adaptation being urgent issues to address. For this, the EU stands with the EaP countires to support green and just recovery and build climate neutrality and resilience”, - mentioned Michael Rupp, the representative from the EC Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR) in his welcoming remarks.
In the session dedicated to the progress made by the EaP countries with updating their NDCs, Nona Budoyan, the Head of Climate Policy Department of the RA Ministry of Environment, briefed on the current status of Armenia’s revised NDC, the arguments necessary for its revision and the targets set in it. She also informed on the NDC implementation plan 2021-2030, its coherence with sectoral strategies in energy, transport, agriculture and forestry, as well as the NDC financial strategy to be developed furtherly that will identify the sources and mechanisms for filling the financial gaps.
Furthermore, the experiences of the EU on developing and implementing its NDC, the ambitious targets set in it, the necessary legislative changes and policy proposals per main emitter sectors, as well as the EU’s recovery instruments for funding in climate actions and investment capacities were presented by Cyril Loisel from DG CLIMA.
Joakim Frendin from DG NEAR, spoke on the EU’s technical assistance provided to the EaP countries through a range of regional and local projects, including the EU4Climate, aimed to foster climate resilience via policies and innovative climate solutions. He introduced also financial frameworks for climate investments and instruments of mobilizing funds towards speeding up the green transition.
During the discussion session, among the main challenges in NDC planning processes, Armenia identified the gaps in sectoral strategies or targets set in NDC, their different timeframes, as well as emphasized the technical capacity building need for civil society, as a key factor for engagement of NGOs in NDC development and implementation processes.
Throughout the second day of the workshop, the presented topics covered the issues of enhanced transparency framework and reporting of the NDC implementation, integrating adaptation component in NDC on the example of Moldova, and integration of gender in NDC internationally and on the example of Belarus, referring to challenges, gaps, potential and recommendations for gender mainstreaming in NDCs. Besides, the NECP (National Energy and Climate Plan) development steps and the reporting requirements and its alignment and harmonization with NDC were presented to the participants.
Regarding the financing of NDCs, the workshop provided insights in developing finance strategies, including specifying countries’ needs, recommended tools for designing them and planning steps on the example of best global practices.
During the discussion session, questions on the current progress of NDC finance planning in the countries were presented. In this regard, Armenia, having completed the climate budget tagging exercise, considered it as a useful methodology for identifying the public resources. Among the main challenges and barriers in finance planning, the lack of methodology, financial cycles alignment of different sources of funding were identified by the representatives of Armenia.
The two-day workshop identified the main challenges and success factors for NDC development, implementation and financing, as well as provided knowledge on the best practices of translating NDC into actions and successful approaches that can be applied by EaP countries.
