You could say the heart of the Paris Agreement on climate change are countries’ NDCs, their commitments to mitigate and adapt to climate change. If your heart was underperforming, your doctor might recommend an EKG to monitor it and look for signs of disease. This data and information can be life-saving, and it’s critical for designing an improvement plan.
The NDCs are currently insufficient to meet the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5-2 degrees C, and currently lead to 2....
WRI’s Tracking and Strengthening Climate Action TASCA initiative provides governments with the tools and resources they need to track the implementation and effects of their climate policies and commitments under the Paris Agreement. Participating countries include Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, and South Africa.
Because better information about climate finance offers big benefits, Colombia worked with WRI and its partners on a new system to measure, report and verify how much funding goes toward climate change projects. Launched November 27, the system has registered $6 billion worth of climate change actions.
You can’t change what you can’t measure. That’s true whether you’re talking about losing weight, improving your race time or reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
When it comes to climate action, measuring countries’ emissions and the progress they make toward reducing them is critical for evaluating whether the world is on track to limit temperature rise to 1.5-2 degrees C. Measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) of emissions and emissions reductions is necessary to ensure that efforts to combat climate change are paying off.
The Paris Agreement, forged last December,...
The Paris Agreement has set the world on course for transformative climate action to cut emissions, promote clean energy, build climate resilience, and catalyze climate action investments. The Agreement’s backbone is transparency and accountability on the steps countries are taking toward these goals. This transparency is vital for building international trust and confidence that action is taking place as well as for assessing how to facilitate further action.
At least 40 countries and several sub-national regions have implemented greenhouse gas reporting programs. A new report provides step-by-step guidance on how policymakers can design them effectively.
As countries negotiate a new international climate agreement for the post-2020 period—including at this week’s intersessional meeting in Bonn, Germany—the key choices for putting the world on a secure pathway to a low-carbon future should be front-of-mind. The new agreement will be essential for putting in place the policies beyond 2020 that ensure a shift from high-carbon to low-carbon and climate-resilient investments. To do this, the agreement will have to send the right signals to governments and businesses about the trajectory we need to be on.
The UNFCCC meetings in Bonn this week mark a critical time, as one of the issues negotiators are focusing on is the development of countries’ post-2020 plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Parties in a position to do so must communicate their post-2020 “contributions” by the first quarter of 2015. To help inform this discussion, we published a working paper outlining what this information should look like and why this level of transparency is important.
This piece was written with analysis from Athena Ballesteros, Edward Cameron, Yamide Dagnet, Florence Daviet, Aarjan Dixit, Heather McGray, and Clifford Polycarp.
Expectations were low for this year’s UNFCCC climate negotiations in Doha, Qatar (COP 18), which concluded last week. It was scheduled to be a “finalize-the-rules” type of COP, rather than one focused on large, political deals that went into the early hours of the morning. Key issues on the table included finalizing the rules for the Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period; concluding a series of decisions on transparency, finance, adaptation, and forests (REDD+); and agreeing on a work plan to negotiate a new legally binding international climate agreement by 2015. The emissions gap was also front-and-center, as the new UNEP Gap Report showed that countries are further away than even a year ago from the goal of keeping global average temperature rise below two degrees C.
In the end, countries were successful in making progress, but only incrementally. The lack of political will was breathtaking, particularly in light of recent extreme weather events.
Here’s a look at what happened across nine key issues that were on the table:
As we move into the second week of the UN climate talks, the desert sand is swirling around the conference center in Doha, Qatar. Countries spent the first week tying up some loose ends on several issues, but there are still many details to be worked out before the sand settles and Parties head home. It’s hard to tell whether this meeting will turn into a full sandstorm or clear up.