Ghana has begun strengthening and building technical capacities of institutions towards the enhanced and rigorous climate reporting regime beginning 2024.
The move is in line with the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change, that established the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) under Article 13 for climate action support to enable all countries to track progress of climate actions and further raise ambitions.
Ghana, as a party to the Paris Agreement, participated in the Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency (CBIT) established under the Agreement to strengthen institutions and build technical capacities of developing countries to effectively participate in the ETF.
Ghana’s Focal Person to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Dr Daniel Tutu Benefoh, told the Ghana News Agency, on Thursday in Accra.
He said that the reporting regime under the ETF were national communications, Greenhouse gas inventory of anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases and Biennial Transparency Reports (BTR),
The rest are Information necessary to track Progress made of implementation and achieving of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), Information related to Climate Change Impact and Adaptation, Information on financial, technology development and transfer and capacity building support.
He explained that in 2018, Ghana received approval from Global Environment Fund (GEF) funding, to roll out its CBIT project – which its implementation commenced in 2020 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The objective of Ghana’s CBIT project, funded by the Global Environmental Facility was to strengthen national systems to effectively and regularly track and report the country’s NDCs.
Dr Benefoh said, the Project had helped identify and address gaps in the areas of institutional arrangements, data management, and reviewed methodologies for energy, transport, agriculture and waste statistics.
He said through CIBIT indicators to track NDC actions had been developed and incorporated into the national monitoring and evaluation framework system for long-term monitoring of sector- led climate actions amongst others.
A Principal Programme Officer at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Mrs Juliana Bempah, stated that Ghana’s CBIT project had four main outputs with 16 activities that were implemented within 36 months.
These included the assessment of an effective institutional arrangement to plan, implement and report climate actions, development of a centralized national infrastructure for improved data access and information management.
She said since 2020, the project team working with stakeholders had delivered on almost all the activities, including an assessment of the capacities and roles of 25 climate reporting institutions using internationally defined scale.
A Senior Programme Officer at the EPA, Mr Daniel Lamptey, said, through the CBIT Project, the EPA developed indicators and a template for capturing the progress of implementation of the updated NDCs in line with Article 4.9 of the Paris Agreement while NDCs sector agencies had been trained on data gathering and reporting. —GNA
