PACJA Trains PAP Members on NDC Tracking Tool

Members of the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) will be trained on Tuesday 13 April 2021 to track the implementation of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) of African countries using a tool developed by the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance PACJA.

PACJA commissioned the NDC Implementation Index and a data collection tool in 2019 as part of its commitment to strengthening independent monitoring African NDC implementation in compliance with the Paris Agreement.

Experts from PACJA will lead the training, which includes briefings on recently completed studies on the political economy of climate change Governance in Africa.

“Members of Parliament are key actors in holding governments accountable and driving actions at national and local levels,” said Dr Mithika Mwenda, Executive Director of PACJA. “We are proud to partner with PAP to build and strengthen the capacity of Parliamentarians, policymakers and representatives of regional bodies on the use of the developed NDC Implementation Index and Monitoring and Tracking Tools.”

PACJA has a longstanding cooperation with PAP aimed at strengthening African parliamentarians’ engagement with regional and global climate change discourses. Through the African Climate Legislative Initiative (ACLI), PACJA works with PAP to promote climate legislative work, which has increased the number of parliamentarians from PAP and other regional legislative assemblies participating in climate change processes.

WHY NDCS?

Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Warsaw in November 2013 agreed to each prepare an official statement of the greenhouse-gas emission reductions that the party was willing to undertake in the period up to 2030. The parties further agreed that these statements, which were referred to as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), were to be made available before the 2015 annual meeting.
COP21 in Paris, France in 2015 concluded with “the Paris Agreement, outlining a global goal for climate change mitigation (Article 2.1), namely “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels”. Also, the Agreement sets out a long-term, global goal on climate change adaptation (Article 7.1), namely “enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change, with a view to contributing to sustainable development and ensuring an adequate adaptation response in the context of the temperature goal”.

Progress towards this ambitious goal depends on the successful implementation of the national climate pledges submitted by 189 countries in the run-up to and since COP-21 – dubbed the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The NDCs spell out the actions that countries intend to take to address climate change – both in terms of adaptation and mitigation. Originally submitted as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), these become binding Nationally Determined Contributions once a country ratifies the Paris Agreement. However, since the ratification of these NDCs, there has been little in terms of reporting of the status of implementation especially on the African continent. This has been attributed to many factors including lack of technical capacity and financial resources to implement the required activities.

NDC Tracking Tool

In July 2019, PACJA commissioned a study to develop an NDC Implementation Index and supporting Data Collection Tools to monitor the implementation of NDCs in Africa in compliance with the Paris Agreement.

This also included a study to understand the Political Economy of African Countries concerning NDCs and climate change governance; stakeholder analysis of actors; the institutions involved in the development and implementation of the NDCs; climate governance; mapping of suitable tools; methods and indicators that exist and maybe in use in Africa to improve accountability as well as defining and delineating the scope of NDCs implementation index including measures that will be used and dimensions that will be covered.

The Nationally Determined Contributions, Implementation Index and Tracking Tools for Africa Report is now finalized and is being tested as part of accountability mechanisms that will be used to track the implementation of NDCs by countries in Africa.

The Political Economy Report gives an in-depth analysis of the interactions of political and economic processes within each of the eight selected countries, on Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation; the distribution of power and wealth between the different governmental and non-governmental groups and individual stakeholders, and the dynamics/processes that create, sustain and transfer such processes over time.
The assignment took cognizance of the fact that the Paris Agreement and its attendant driving tool -the NDCs, is critical in Africa’s climate governance landscape and that it will involve looking at structures, institutions, and actors/stakeholders in the formulation, implementation, and measuring, reporting and verification (MRV) of each of the country’s NDCs.

Following the reports, PACJA developed two policy briefs: Is Africa Ready for NDCs Implementation? Assessing the Political Economy of Climate Change Governance in Select African Countries and Is Africa Ready for NDCs Implementation? An Assessment of NDCs Implementation Preparedness in Eight African Countries and an Infographic.