UN Climate Change News, 20 February 2023 - Four developing countries - Burundi, Pakistan, Vanuatu and Mexico are making considerable efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, demonstrating that effective climate action is possible and can be further scaled up with adequate financial, technical and capacity-building support.
This is the key conclusion of a technical analysis of biennial update reports (BURs) undertaken earlier this year. BURs, which are submitted by developing countries to the UN Climate Change secretariat include the status of a country’s greenhouse gas emissions and information on how the country is cutting emissions, along with information on support needed and received.
Reporting of climate actions is crucial for ensuring accountability among governments and supports collective progress toward achieving the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global warming to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times.
The key climate actions outlined in the reports range from the development of renewable energy sources, sustainable forest management through reforestation and community management, waste management and relevant policy development.
The four developing countries have been making considerable efforts in the energy sector to increase the share of renewable sources in their energy mix. Here are some examples:
- By 2030, Vanuatu aims to switch to 100 percent renewable energy for its energy generation, making use of solar, wind and hydro energy.
- Mexico intends to generate 35% of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2024.
- Burundi plans to provide clean and efficient cookstoves to 311,000 households, to electrify 800 schools and health centres and to install 58 electricity minigrids in rural communities between 2020-2026.
- Pakistan is introducing new energy efficiency standards and labelling to reduce energy consumption.
The countries also showcased significant actions and ambitions in the forestry and land-use sector. For example:
- Burundi aims to increase its total area of forest cover by 20 percent by 2025.
- Mexico, through its national programmes on community forest management and payment for environmental services has managed to reduce approximately 40 Mt CO2 of emissions between 2018-2020 by reducing deforestation and increasing forest carbon stocks.
- Pakistan also intends to increase forest cover by afforestation and has afforested around 100,000 hectares between 2009-2013.
More support is needed for countries to further raise ambition
Whilst these examples are inspiring, a great deal more needs to be done at the global scale to put the world on a path to low emissions. The countries which submitted their BURs all expressed their need for financial resources, technical and technology support as well as capacity-building to step up their actions.
During the technical analysis, the team of technical experts in consultation with governments experts, identified capacity-building measures that will contribute to increasing the transparency of future reporting and to facilitate the transition to the Enhanced Transparency Framework under the Paris Agreement by these countries.
Such measures included improving the capacity of national experts to collect relevant climate data – for example by supporting them to develop data collection standards to collect data from the private and public sectors. In addition, capacity-building was proposed in the use of more robust methodologies for greenhouse gas inventories, and country-specific emission factors.
More information on the technical analysis process can be found here.
Image at top of article: The Wintua-Lorlow micro-grid. A micro-grid is an independent energy system that operate outside of the national grid. (Photo: Ian Iercet/ UNDP). Read more about Vanuatu's community-run solar power station here.
