The Asia LEDSPartnership (ALP) hosted a peer learning webinar series on ‘Sub National Integration in the Asia Pacific’, convened as part of its Subnational Integration Community of Practice. The webinar included three sessions on climate action planning tools and methodologies, climate project structuring, and Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) systems, besides interactive and scenario-building sessions and exercises.
In the session on ‘Climate Action Planning: Guidance for Sub-National Governments’, the participants were introduced to ICLEI’s ClimateResilientCITIES Action Plan methodology, a tailor-made tool for the development of city action plans, as well as the HEAT+ tool. There were also presentations on knowledge-sharing platforms such as the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy and CDP-ICLEI Unified Reporting System and on ICLEI’s Transformative Actions Programme and Cities Race to Resilience and Cities Race to Zero campaigns.
The second session discussed the opportunities and initiatives for climate project prioritization and structuring. Ms. Ina de Visser, Project Manager, GIZ, explained how the City Climate Finance GAP Fund Initiative could support and address project preparation gaps. She said that $93 trillion was needed for global climate obligations until 2030 (United Nations estimate), of which $4.5 trillion was needed just for project preparation. “There is considerable willingness to invest in climate, and there is a huge demand from cities. However, their area gap between the matchmaking and implementation processes. The City Climate Finance Gap Fund helps to bridge this gap,’’ Ms de Visser added.
Dr. Michael Lindfield, Director, Urban Infrastructure Services, Sydney, spoke about the project development cycle and constraints in accessing urban climate finance, adding that project structuring should be mainly undertaken by the cities. He emphasized the need for more awareness about climate finance instruments while pointing out that cities often lacked the capacity and expertise to access them.
In the last session, Roziya Kirgizbekova, Advisor and Regional Group Coordinator for South Asia, Partnership on Transparency in the Paris Agreement, emphasized the need to strengthen institutional arrangements, policy frameworks, and capacity building at the subnational level for improving national transparency. Dr. Rose Bailey, Associate Director, Climate Action Planning and Transparency, Ricardo Energy & Environment, UK, said that the dimension of MRV systems had expanded to cover tracking of mitigation actions and climate finance also.
Dr. Phuong Nam Nguyen, climate advisor, Klinova climate innovation consulting company, Vietnam, called for a straightforward process to track climate actions and impacts, while Dr. Yassin Mkwizu, Senior Advisor, Royal Norwegian Embassy, Tanzania, spoke about Dar es Salaam city’s focus on mitigation actions to improve data collection and tracking.
The session recordings can be accessed at:
Series I: Climate Action Planning: Guidance for Sub-National Governments
Series II: Prioritization and structuring of climate projects
Series III: Role and importance of MRV at Sub-National level