Introduction
Anglophone Africa has been convening a series of webinars among the network countries to share experiences on planning and development of their first BTR. Considering that 2024 is crucial for countries to develop and report their first BTR, it is important that countries begin to internalize the new requirements for timely, transparent, and quality reporting to the UNFCCC as soon as possible.
This third session intends to zoom in with experience sharing from Ghana on the applicability of the modalities, procedures, and guidelines (MPGs) for the ETF as contained in decision 18/CMA.1 and implementation of the QA/QC plan specifically on Chapter One of the BTR: National inventory report of anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of GHGs.
Background
The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, introduced an Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) with the aim of promoting trust and clarity among Parties and tracking progress towards achieving the goals of the Agreement. With the launch of the strengthened transparency framework of the Paris Agreement, all countries are called upon to submit their first biennial transparency report (BRT) by December 2024. In recognition of their national circumstances, LDCs/ SIDS are offered additional discretion in reporting, where they can choose to submit the information in their Biennial Transparency Reports (BTR) at their discretion.
Reporting of results of national Greenhouse Gas (GHG) inventories transparently is a key requirement under the Paris Agreement’s Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF). It comprises detailed planning work on using quantitative and qualitative information to estimate the GHG emissions and removals that occur in the country in a transparent, accurate, complete, comparable, and consistent manner. The MPGs, formulated to implement transparency in reporting under the Paris Agreement, defined new requirements for reporting national GHG inventories’ results. As such, information on national GHG inventory results should be included in a specific chapter of the BTR (Chapter I), and supporting information should be included in the annexes. In addition, all Parties must provide a national inventory report (NIR), consisting of a national inventory document (NID) and common reporting tables (CRT), to the UNFCCC as part of each Party´s BTR submission process.
Many countries now count on the skills they cultivated as part of the formulation of their previous National Communications and BUR to prepare national GHG inventories. Some of them have already started updating their current inventories as part of the process of preparing their BTR. However, the task of reporting on the associated processes that lead to the development of inventories and using the new formats are also key aspects to ensure that countries comply with the transparency conditions established in Article 13 and can become a challenge for the countries if they do not count with the knowledge and tools to do this in a proper manner.
To this end, CBIT-GSP intends to support the countries in this important process by bringing national experts together on key reporting areas of BTR, reviewing the GHG inventories, and providing a platform for sharing best practices and lessons learned on ETF.
Objective
The main objective of the webinar is to share experiences and lessons learned among experts from Anglophone Africa Transparency Network countries to support the country practitioners and experts reporting the results of the National GHG Inventories processes in improving the technical contents of NIRs and BTRs, following the considerations indicated in the MPGs.
Specific objectives:
- Exchange experiences and lessons corresponding to the application Modalities Procedures and Guidelines (MPGs) of ETF provisions for Chapter I of the BTR.
- Exchange experiences and lessons learned on the implementation of the QA/QC plan in Chapter I of the BTR