The CBIT team in a discussion
The Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency (CBIT) project has strengthened efforts toward ensuring a sustainable and effective national system for effective reporting on climate actions.
The initiative, funded by the Global Environmental facility has built the technical capacities of institutions toward an enhanced and rigorous climate reporting regime beginning in 2024.
The move is in line with the Paris Agreement 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’s Focal Person to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Dr. Daniel Tutu Benefoh, said 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 in implementing and achieving 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) to roll out its CBIT project but implementation commenced in 2020.
Dr. Tutu Benefoh said the Project had helped identify and address gaps in the areas of institutional arrangements, data management, methodologies for energy, transport, agriculture, and waste statistics.
He said through CBIT, 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.
Principal Programme Officer at the Environmental Protection Agency, Juliana Bempah, stated that Ghana’s CBIT project had four main outputs with 16 activities that were implemented within 36 months.
The main outputs were the assessment of an effective institutional arrangement to plan, implement and report climate actions, the development of a centralized national infrastructure for improved data access and information management.
Other outputs include the mainstreaming of five climate change indicators into the medium-term framework and testing and piloting of the domestic transparency (MRV) framework in the Energy and Transport sectors.
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.
Senior Programme Officer at the EPA 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.
He noted that NDCs sector agencies at the national and district levels had been equipped with the knowledge and skills on how to gather data and report on the implementation and progress of the country’s climate action.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri