Project Title: “Strengthening Governance of Climate Change Finance Programme”, UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub
Project Description:
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the UN’s Global Development Network, advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life. UNDP is on the ground in over 170 countries, employing participatory approaches to developing local solutions to national and global development challenges. UNDP’s focus is to respond to three sets of development issues: (1) Eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, (2) Accelerating structural transformation for sustainable development, and (3) Building resilience to shocks and crises.
UNDP’s Strengthening Governance of Climate Change Finance Programme (GCCF) for the Asia-Pacific region, which began in 2012, focuses on generating knowledge and a shared understanding on how to integrate a response to climate change within national budget processes. Currently, the Programme is targeting Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Pakistan and Nepal. Since 2017, the Programme has supported governments to implement budget reforms that enable the delivery of gender-responsive climate change-related investments but with a specific focus on poverty and human rights and with the aim to achieve the following objectives:
National budget processes increasingly formulate and identify Climate Change-related investments that are gender-responsive and with positive impacts on poverty and human rights,
National accountability for gender-responsive Climate Change-related investments that have impacts on poverty and human rights is enhanced, Subnational institutions increasingly play a role in integrated approaches to gender-responsive Climate Change budgeting with impacts on poverty and human rights, International policy processes give increasing priority to strengthening domestic budget systems that enable the delivery of gender-responsive Climate Change investments that have positive impacts on poverty and human rights.
The programme has developed climate budget tagging systems for tracking domestic climate related expenditures. These systems have fed into national transparency and accountability initiatives around climate finance and its effectiveness. The CBT is also being integrated into national reporting to the COP through National communications reports, BURs and MRV systems. Going forward it will be interesting to see how these systems can provide useful data in the context of the COVID19 response and recovery efforts. Particularly as it becomes even more imperative to build back economies that are stronger and greener.
Following COP-21 (2015/Paris), attention turned from developing and submitting NDCs to preparing for their effective implementation. UNDP plays a central role in building countries’ capacity to implement their NDCs, given its experience and technical expertise in this area. In particular, UNDP’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) Support Programme works with 36 countries around the world to advance the implementation of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The recently launched Climate Promise programme also aims to strengthen country systems for tracking climate finance related to the NDCs.
The UNFCCC Standing Committee on Finance (SCF) was established by the Conference of the Parties (COP) at its 17th session. One of the functions of the SCF is to assist the COP with respect to the measurement, reporting and verification of the support provided to developing country Parties through activities such as the preparation of the biennial assessment and overview of climate finance flows (BA). In order to fulfill this mandate, the SCF has initiated the preparation of the 2020 BA and issued a call for evidence: information and data. The SCF is looking for evidence on:
• Methodological issues relating to measuring, reporting, and verifying climate finance flows;
• Data on climate-related finance flows, and
• Assessment of the effectiveness of climate finance flows, including drivers, impact results, meeting needs, and access.
• Information relevant to Article 2, paragraph 1(c) of the Paris Agreement.
The Objective of this assignment is to update the database on climate finance across GCCF and other countries supported by UNDP on climate finance and develop the corporate submission to the SCF as UNDP’s contribution of public finance data for the 2020BA.