ICAT tools published: assessing the impact of national climate policies and actions

ICAT press release:

At a time when action on climate change is more urgent than ever, the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT) has deployed a set of tools to help countries assess the impact of their climate policies and improve their chances of strengthening and achieving their national climate goals under the Paris Agreement.

• The ICAT Assessment Guides provide governments and non-state actors with the means to assess the impacts of national policies and actions that reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Besides assessing impacts on emissions, the Guides help to assess impacts on countries’ sustainable development goals and the potential for transformational change.
• As 2020 is the year countries prepare to update their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, the timing of the release of the ICAT Assessment Guides will please many governments looking to not only track and report their progress but to increase their commitment and attract additional financing to support their actions.
• Particularly valuable for governments is how the Assessment Guides go beyond GHG emissions and towards delivering benefits for sustainable development and growth, tailoring the required policies to their domestic policy reality, also engaging subnational and non-state actors.
• ICAT supports developing countries with the resources, expertise and capacity building needed to apply these tools, enabling countries to run more effective, evidence-based policy processes. Currently, ICAT works in over 30 countries across four regions of the world.
• The Assessment Guides are an easy-to-use set of methodologies which, covering the main pillars of GHG mitigation together with sustainable development impact, were designed to be used by policymakers and technical experts in combination or separately.

What’s next?

To support the application of the ICAT Assessment Guides, ICAT is providing policymakers and technical experts with a dedicated series of webinars to better understand how they can utilize the Guides and benefit from their application.

The webinar series will feature national and international experts exploring some of the key methodologies and their application in renewable energy, forestry, and transport pricing and the assessment of impacts for sustainable development and transformational change, and non-state and subnational actors. To learn more about any of the webinars and to register, please click here.

GHGMI’s Molly White and Kathryn Goldman developed the ICAT Assessment Guide for Forestry and Agriculture. Molly will be presenting the Forestry tool through a webinar on June 17th. Register for the webinar here.

Also, GHGMI is now acting as an ICAT Implementing Partner. Together with GHGMI’s consortium partners: International Expert Centre on Air Pollution and Climate Change (Citepa) and the Oko-Institut, we will provide technical support to six new ICAT countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Chad, Chile, Fiji, Liberia, and Nigeria.