Objective  

 The PCCB’s focus area for 2023 is ‘Capacity-building support for adaptation, with a focus on addressing gaps and needs related to formulating and implementing national adaptation plans (NAPs)’. The PCCB4NAPs Day is expected to feature discussions on capacity-building for NAPs, including a deep dive into some of the key themes that emerged from the PCCB’s call for submissions on the 2023 focus area (synthesized here). The Day will also explore and discuss region specific capacity-building needs and solutions and findings from relevant work undertaken by UNFCCC bodies, entities and processes, including from the PCCB’s 2023 regional thematic dialogues on building capacities for NAP implementation strategies. In this context, this thematic day will provide a conducive space for capacity-building stakeholders from across all regional and institutional backgrounds to share relevant experiences, good practices, tools and methodologies, and lessons learned.   

Topics  

• The Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, the International Water Management Institute, Arup, and Deltares will share opportunities and barriers towards implementing effective NAPs by focusing on the Water Tracker for National Climate Planning and water as an instrument to facilitate equity and inclusion, prosperity, environmental sustainability, sectoral coherence, and climate resilience. 

• GGGI and UN Women will offer a participant-driven learning exchange on how to apply tools to integrate gender in climate policies and instruments such as NAPs, and how to identify co-benefits of climate action that can drive gender equality and social inclusion outcomes. 

• GGGI and the LEG will draw attention to different stages in the NAP process, from gap assessment to enhancing institutional capacities for NAP development and implementation, focusing on the sharing of relevant knowledge and the identification of the main elements of a capacity building programme to address existing NAP gaps and replicate best practices. 

• IOM will host a high-level roundtable to facilitate the sharing of experiences of mainstreaming human mobility into the NAPs, featuring an introduction to the draft Supplement on Human Mobility for the UNFCCC Technical Guidelines for National Adaptation Plan Process, as well as peer learning about good practices, challenges, and gaps from shared experiences. 

• International Renewable Energy Systems Inc. will facilitate an intergenerational dialogue to share experience, knowledge, and insights on the role of capacity-building in enhancing NAPs, promoting collaborations to boost collective capacity-building, and action-focused contact-linking, relationship-building, and skills-sharing to enhance the achievement of NAPs across countries and regions. 

• UNCDF Local’s session will be dedicated to the question of how local governments can be engaged in delivering adaptation results in support of NAP implementation, focusing on three pillars: capacity building for climate change mainstreaming into local public planning and budgeting systems, innovative financial mechanisms and implementation of local climate action in the context of the NAP process. 

• NAP Global Network’s event seeks to highlight the importance of subnational and local-level engagement in national-level policies and plans that are designed to build resilience to the impacts of climate change, focusing on increasing awareness of lessons learned and good practices, as well as  enhancing understanding of different methods to build capacities for implementing NAPs. 

• The Adaptation Committee and the NAP Global Network are presenting relevant work in the area of monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) for adaptation, including a work-in-progress toolkit. The session will feature the collection of live audience feedback via interactive modalities, as well as a discussion on how Indigenous perspectives can be meaningfully incorporated in this critical component of the adaptation cycle. 

• The PCCB and the NAP Global Network will share findings from the regional thematic dialogues on ‘Building capacities for NAP implementation strategies’ organized during the 2023 UNFCCC regional climate weeks, and showcase case studies and best practices of how countries have built their capacities to formulate and implement effective implementation strategies through an interactive group discussion session. 

At the request of the COP, the PCCB annually focuses on an area related to enhanced technical exchange on capacity-building, with the purpose of maintaining up-to-date knowledge on the successes and challenges in building capacity effectively in a particular area. The PCCB’s focus area for 2023 is “Capacity-building support for adaptation, with a focus on addressing gaps and needs in formulating and implementing NAPs”. This focus area was selected following an invitation by the Adaptation Committee for constituted bodies to jointly scale up support in this area. 

The formulation and implementation of NAPs remains challenging for many developing countries due to capacity gaps and needs in various areas and at different levels. These persisting gaps and needs are hampering the building of adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change. Ninety-seven per cent of the 37 NAP documents submitted to the secretariat as at 22 October 2022 mention capacity-building, with over half of the documents including it as a cross-sectoral or strategic priority.