Accra-Ghana, Jan. 27, GNA – Ghana has begun strengthening and building technical capacities of institutions towards 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.
Dr Daniel Tutu Benefoh, Ghana’s Focal Person to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told the Ghana News Agency, on Thursday day in Accra.
He said the reporting regime under the ETF included 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 implementation and achievement of 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 – whose implementation commenced in 2020 due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.
The objective of Ghana’s CBIT project, funded by the Global Environmental Facility is to strengthen national systems to effectively and regularly track and report the country’s NDCs.
Dr Tutu Benefoh said the Project had helped identified and addressed 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.
Mrs Juliana Bempah, a Principal Programme Officer at the Environmental Protection Agency 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, development of a centralized national infrastructure for improved data access and information management, mainstreaming of five climate change indicators into the medium-term framework, and testing and piloting of 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.
Mr Daniel Lamptey, a Senior Programme Officer at the EPA, said through the CBIT Project, the EPA had 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.
