This meeting is organized as part of the in-country support requests from Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan

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By invitations only.

Background: 

The Mutual Learning Program for Enhanced Transparency (MLP), implemented and funded by the Ministry of the Environment, Japan (MOEJ), aims to assist countries to prepare their Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) under the enhanced transparency framework of the Paris Agreement through mutual learning of practices. The MLP is managed by Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting (MURC) in close collaboration with the Capacity-building Initiative for Transparency - Global Support Programme (CBIT-GSP).

In 2023, representatives of the five countries, namely Azerbaijan, Georgia, Japan, Moldova, and Uzbekistan, successfully completed the MLP for reporting of mitigation actions in the energy sector. In 2024, representatives of the same countries started the second phase of the MLP focusing on the agriculture sector. 

On May 30 2024, they met together at the kick-off meeting (online) and discussed the detailed plan of the second phase of the MLP including a reporting exercise of common tabular format (CTF)-5 associated with BTRs. Since then, they have worked on the exercise, exchanged and reviewed each other’s exercise, and shared their questions and comments. 

This main meeting, graciously hosted by the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, Azerbaijan, aims to provide the opportunity for the country experts to discuss each country’s reporting exercise in detail and next steps for the countries to submit the First BTRs by the end of 2024, continuously improve BTRs over time, and link this information to the implementation of NDCs. 

Expectation shared by countries and objectives:

At the kick-off meeting in May, countries shared their expectations for the main meeting. Based on their expectation and needs, the main meeting specifically aims to:

• As several countries are to finalize the draft BTR, the main meeting can be the opportunity to verify the draft’s compliance with the BTR requirements and adjust it for improvements.
• More specifically, the following topics are the countries’ interest/concern (at the time of the kick-off meeting) which can be further discussed:
  • Amount of information, detail, granularity etc. 
  • Approaches to quantify expected emission reductions, which are not yet the part of the existing plan
  • How to overcome limited data and reduce uncertainties
  • How to use the flexibility mechanism
  • Impacts of mitigation actions in the sector, including intersectoral policies
  • How to track progress with conditional vs. unconditional targets 

Expected outcomes:

At the end of the main meeting, participants should be able to:

• Increased understanding of how to complete the CTF-5 in the agriculture sector as part of the BTR
• Increased confidence to submit the CTF-5 as part of the BTR
• Shared knowledge of how to make progress and overcome challenges with BTR preparation
• Increased awareness and inspiration of how to link the information of BTRs to NDCs
• Enhanced collaborative networks among the participating experts, organizations, and countries
• Recommendations for future collaboration, including through the MLP and other channels