Topic: MRV

A Copenhagen agreement on climate change will likely take a legally binding form, but one that provides for a range of commitments by countries. This Working Paper clarifies a complex set of issues around the legal character of commitments and weighs the potential risks and benefits to countries of expressing their “nationally appropriate mitigation actions” (NAMAs) in a legally binding form.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change employs a system of national communications and greenhouse gas inventories to monitor implementation of the Convention. This analysis examines the strengths and weaknesses of that system in the context of a post-2012 international climate change agreement, considering the Bali Action Plan provisions on measurement, reporting, and verification. It concludes that while the existing system contains elements that can support some parts of a post-2012 framework, a significant retrofit, accompanied by new processes, will be needed to measure, report, and verify the obligations envisioned in the Bali Action Plan.

This paper seeks to facilitate progress on the provisions in the BAP by examining how Chinese climate change policy and the implementation of these policies is monitored at the domestic level and may offer insights to the international community as they consider an international structure for measuring, reporting and verifying developing country actions. China provides a rich set of examples of such policies due to its active efforts to cut its growth in energy use and reducing its dependence on fossil fuels. The paper therefore looks at mitigation policies and measures in China across a variety of sectors and at policies and measures that employ both qualitative and quantitative measurement systems.

As country representatives meet under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to forge a new climate agreement, a major challenge dominates discussions: how can a system be created to assure that countries are held accountable for their commitments and actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and their obligations to provide technology, finance and capacity building support? This working paper seeks to facilitate progress on this critical component of a successful climate agreement. It aims to help policy-makers, UNFCCC negotiators and civil society groups navigate the complexity of the “MRV” challenge by focusing attention on central questions in advance of the December talks in Copenhagen and presenting country positions to date.

This paper explores key provisions of the Bali Action Plan (BAP), adopted by the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2007, that begin to address these questions as part of a road map to a post 2012 agreement. We review existing international climate change agreements, national climate change strategies, Party submissions to the international climate policy negotiation process and other background literature. We first discuss how developing countries frame nationally appropriate mitigation actions. We then consider what forms of technology, financing and capacity-building might support them, and how both mitigation actions and support might be made measurable, reportable and verifiable (MRV) in the context of an international agreement. We suggest that a robust MRV framework for mitigation actions and support can make an important contribution to equitable and environmentally effective mitigation. We therefore propose that the development of a set of principles to guide the inclusion of MRV in the international climate policy framework may help achieve this crucial outcome.

A guide on design and implementation of effective GHG programs based on internationally accepted standards and methodologies for GHG accounting and reporting.