The project ‘Strengthening capacity for monitoring environmental emissions under the Paris Agreement in Bangladesh’, which continued for three years, ended.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in partnership with the Department of Environment (DoE) and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change organised a closing workshop of the project at DoE auditorium in Dhaka on Thursday (December 28).
Speakers of the closing workshop claimed that the USD two million (GEF support and Govt. co-finance) ended with outstanding results.
Dr. Farhina Ahmed, secretary of Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change; attended the event as the chief guest with Dr. Abdul Hamid, Director General of DoE; in the chair.
Dr. Fahmida Khanom, Additional Secretary for Development Wing of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change; Sanjay Kumar Bhowmik, Additional Secretary for Climate Change of the ministry; Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, Director General of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics; and Arnoud Hameleers, FAO Representative in Bangladesh; attended the workshop as special guests.
At COP 21, the Paris Agreement of 2015 established a global framework for averting dangerous climate change, which aims for keeping the global temperature far below 2°C and pursuing efforts to keep it below 1.5°C.
Additionally, it strives to assist countries in their endeavours and strengthen their ability to combat climate change's effects. Bangladesh signed the Paris Agreement in 2016.
Despite being a relatively small contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, Bangladesh has shown great commitment to climate governance and formulated National Adaptation Plan (NAP), Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), Delta Plan, and Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan.
The ‘Strengthening capacity for monitoring environmental emissions under the Paris Agreement in Bangladesh’ project supported Bangladesh in its efforts to Paris Agreement implementation in the areas-- developed an integrated climate change measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) platform (mrv.eis.gov.bd) for GHG Inventory, Mitigation Actions, Adaptation Actions, and Finance tracking and reporting for Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU), Energy, Industrial Processes and Product Use (IPPU) and Waste sectors outlined in the NAP, NDC and key climate change plans and strategies.
This platform is supporting the preparation of national GHG inventory, National Communication and biennial transparency report (BTR) by providing updated activity and emission factors data with a structured archiving system, updating of GHG emission, adaptation, mitigation and finance database.
One of the important aspects of this platform is to bring all the relevant stakeholders on a single platform for data sharing, analysis and interpretation.
However, the MRV system is not only supporting the monitoring the national progress on climate action but also contributing to the informed planning, programming, resource allocation and policy making.
The project significantly improved the DoE’s capabilities, particularly on GIS analysis, statistical software operation, programming, and enhancement of IT infrastructure and GIS lab. It also established an Environmental Information System (eis.gov.bd) for DoE to compile, analyse, archive, and share environmental data including GHG emissions, air, and water quality, brick kiln, enforcement, and sea level rise.
However, the project prepared a national Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) Roadmap for Bangladesh to fast-track the Paris Agreement implementation process as well as biennial transparency report (BTR) preparation and submission.The includes a concise, strategic, and participatory plan for achieving ETF requirements, enhancing technical capacity, mainstreaming climate transparency, and fosters long-term climate resilience through target setting, stakeholder engagement, adaptability, and accountability.
Meanwhile, as the permanence of institutional arrangements is a prerequisite of mainstreaming regular data collection, filling national data gaps, operationalize the MRV system, meeting transparency requirement, the project, has facilitated a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between DoE and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) for data collection and sharing in the long term.
This MoU will support regular data collection, sharing, archiving, and reporting of GHG emission and environmental data.
The project recognises that building the knowledge and skills of stakeholders is essential for quality data generation, accurate emission and mitigation estimation, and standard GHG inventory preparation and reporting. In order to achieve this, the project trained more than 350government and private sector stakeholders on GHG inventory, statistical analysis, GIS analysis, database management and MRV system.
FAO will continue its technical assistance to implement the ETF roadmap as response to the request from the Government of Bangladesh, operationalize the MRV platform and carry out the climate transparency related work in Bangladesh through a proposed CBIT Phase II project, national methene reduction framework, Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation Initiative (FAST) and Hand in Hand Initiative as well as FAO’s technical cooperation program facility.
