On May 21, 2026, more than a dozen Salvadoran institutions sent staff to a two-day workshop in San Salvador that, on paper, looked like a training session about a reporting guide. In practice, it was something closer to a discussion about an important number.
That number is climate finance—the money El Salvador needs to meet its climate commitments, the support it has already received, and the gap between the two. Tracking it sounds like an accounting problem, but it’s really a coordination problem at the heart of climate finance transparency, and resolving it is one of the central tasks of our third project phase in the country, led by El Salvador’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) with technical support from the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute (GHGMI), funded by the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT). This inception workshop marked the on-the-ground launch of that project’s third and most ambitious phase.
Why climate finance transparency comes before the money
Since the end of 2024, Parties to the Paris Agreement have been expected to report through the Enhanced Transparency Framework, or ETF, and those reports go well beyond a national emissions tally. They cover progress toward nationally determined contributions (NDCs), policies and measures, climate impacts and adaptation, the support a country has provided and received, and the support it still needs. For developing countries, that last piece carries real weight, because the framework is where a country sets down what it has received and what it still requires to deliver on its pledges.
El Salvador is held to the same reporting expectations as other developing countries, and its latest pledge raises the stakes considerably. The country’s new NDC—the national climate pledge it filed under the Paris Agreement—was submitted in 2025 and runs through 2035. It pairs an unconditional commitment to cut emissions by 5%, which El Salvador can meet on its own, with a conditional commitment to cut emissions by 15%. And that higher target? It depends explicitly on external finance and support. Therefore, two-thirds of El Salvador’s headline ambition to cut emissions rests on money the country doesn’t yet have in hand.
That’s the quiet logic behind the whole effort. You can’t mobilize, report, or be held accountable for finances you can’t track. So transparency, which often gets filed away as a bureaucratic obligation, turns out to be the precondition for the funding that makes a climate target real. Because what gets measured can get funded.
A project built in stages
For audiences familiar with GHGMI’s ICAT work, this third phase is a useful illustration of how transparency projects actually mature, because they’re rarely the work of a single engagement.
El Salvador’s collaboration with ICAT has unfolded as a deliberate progression. The first phase began with an analysis of the country’s NDC, its institutional arrangements, and the conditions required for a monitoring system to function. Phase II then turned that analysis into infrastructure, developing and beginning to institutionalize a web-based MRV platform—a system for monitoring, reporting, and verifying climate action—to track NDC implementation, with a focus on how policies and measures are followed and evaluated over time.
Phase III now extends that arc and carries three main lines of work. The first is hands-on technical assistance to ensure institutions actually report their progress through the country’s MRV platform. The second is developing indicators for the brand-new 2025 NDC. And the third, the genuinely novel piece, is to diagnose the state of climate finance in El Salvador and design a framework to track it, guided by the ICAT Climate Finance Transparency Guide. Along the way, the MRV platform itself is set to gain a new module for recording the support a country needs and receives.
Seen this way, each phase becomes scaffolding for the next. The question shifts from whether the country has a system at all to whether that system can follow the money, which is really the difference between a one-off project that ends when its funding does and a national capability that keeps compounding.
The workshop that refused to be a lecture
The May 21 convening was built around a conviction that runs through GHGMI’s mission and approach to this work. A transparency system only survives if the institutions expected to feed it have a hand in building it. So the workshop was engineered, quite deliberately, not to be a lecture.
It opened with ground rules you’d more often associate with diplomacy than with technical training. Discussions ran under the Chatham House rule, which meant contributions could inform the project but wouldn’t be attributed to any individual or institution. Participants also agreed that the workshop was intended to build shared input rather than to grade anyone’s performance. That agreement extended to any gaps—those gaps would count as useful information about where the system still needs work. For a topic where institutions can get defensive about what they don’t yet do well, that framing was essential.
From there, the roughly 50 participants worked at small tables that deliberately mixed people from different institutions, rather than facing a podium. The exercises were designed to surface a single, stubborn truth: no single institution holds the whole picture. Participants reviewed the project’s early diagnosis of how El Salvador currently tracks climate finance and corrected it themselves, and they followed the journey of a single piece of financial data, from the moment it’s created to the point it lands in an international report. That’s where the coordination problem becomes visible, because it exposes every handoff where data slips through the cracks among MARN, the Ministry of Finance, sectoral institutions, and the country’s international cooperation channels.
From a room in San Salvador to a reportable system
None of this is a report to be filed and forgotten. Instead, the workshop’s outputs feed directly into the next deliverables. The first is a proposed framework for tracking climate finance and support, one that covers governance, definitions, classification, and the procedures for actually following the money. That’s followed, eventually, by a draft of the legal provisions needed to make those arrangements durable rather than dependent on goodwill.
It’s easy to let the acronyms obscure what’s really happening here. Behind the ETF and its dense reporting templates are real people in a room, deciding who validates a figure and how it travels from a sectoral ministry into a report the world can read. El Salvador’s MARN is leading that decision-making, while GHGMI and the ICAT team are there to keep it consistent with international guidance and to turn two days of structured discussion into something that lasts.
The work of meeting the Paris Agreement’s transparency promise rarely makes headlines. More often, it looks like tables of six or eight people, sticky notes grouped into categories, and a patient discussion about definitions. Yet it’s precisely this quiet, behind-the-scenes institution-building that determines whether a country’s climate commitments are credible and whether the finance behind the conditional half of those commitments ever arrives.
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