UN Climate Change News, 9 December 2019 – Members of the data community meeting at the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid (COP25) have begun working on a framework for tracking the climate action of regions, cities, businesses, investors and initiatives which can help with the effective implementation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement.
The potential of cooperative climate initiatives is very significant, since according to a recent study by the NewClimate Institute, even just a few of these initiatives could help close the current gap between what is now needed to put the world on a pathway towards a global average temperature rise of 2°C, if fully implemented and scaled. Current national climate action plans under the Paris Agreement put the world on a path to more than 3°C.
A workshop of data experts in Madrid on the issue concluded with the adoption of a collective statement by the climate data community, which was presented to the Climate Champion for Chile, Gonzalo Muñoz, and Luis Alfonso de Alba, Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for the 2019 Climate Action Summit.
“As a community, our aim is to now create a common framework for tracking progress that looks at targets, ambition, outputs and outcomes to align with the Paris Agreement,” the statement reads.
“For this purpose, we will collaborate to produce a finalized framework to track and identify indicators of progress for credible climate actions. This will include the presentation of initial metrics, which will be reflected on the Global Climate Action portal by COP26.”
The data community working on supporting climate action comprises 30+ organizations - including Yale-NUS and Oxford universities, The Climate Group, German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) CDP and UN Environment (UNEP).
Data is already being collected by some of these groups in the UN Climate Change’s GCA portal, which is a powerful tool to stimulate climate action transparency and to give recognition.
Draft Plans for tracking individual and cooperative actions to be fleshed out in 2020
Focused breakout sessions at the COP25 data workshop, entitled “Pressing Record on Climate Action,” resulted in draft plans for a framework for tracking individual and cooperative actions. The intention is that these plans will be evolved throughout 2020 and formally presented at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn next June, with a view to ensuring that the initial phase of this work is ready for delivery by COP26 in Glasgow at the end of next year.
A priority in 2020 is to optimize the dataflow from individual initiatives to the GCA Portal. This will require increased interchangeability of data between providers and analysts, for example, by introducing common IDs for initiatives.
For the period 2020 to 2023, the main objective is to develop quantifiable metrics that will guide the Global Stocktake mechanism and help to raise national climate ambition. These would include emissions reductions, carbon price, 1.5/2°C alignment and net zero metrics. The framework will be a set of principles governing the process around how these metrics are collected, which is important to provide an even playing field when mapping progress data from the various sources.
The aim is that by 2023, a rigorous and full report should be produced that tracks the mitigation potential of the expanded landscape of cooperative initiatives and demonstrates the achievement of cooperative initiatives since the conclusion of the Paris Agreement.
To reflect the renewed spirit of collaboration, the community adopted a new logo to visualize the ethos of tracking, recording and showcasing global climate action:
Read the full statement here.