More than 250 participants from 80 countries and several international organizations shared their perspectives and experiences in the fields of integrated governance; financing, and transparency for delivering climate goals at the Global NDC Conference 2017 from 2-6 May in Berlin, Germany. CDKN, as part of the Global Secretariat for the Low Emission Development Strategies Global Partnership (LEDS GP) played a pivotal role in co-organising the conference.

Participants identified gaps and opportunities for support; explored concrete opportunities for countries to progress low carbon resilient development through implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs); build peer-networks, and engage with private sector to explore further action.

During the three days of the conference the following key messages emerged:

Integrated Governance

For climate actions to result in tangible development benefits, countries need to reconfigure their governance systems to foster an inclusive, integrated approach to low carbon development.

• High-level leadership is required to foster multi-sectoral and multi-level processes that include climate mitigation and adaptation actions for sustainable development.
• Strong leadership and stakeholder manager capabilities are required to lead the society wide transformation process by engaging new actors and expanding roles and responsibilities for NDC implementation.
• Sectoral approaches are key to NDC implementation. Long-term planning helps breaking down climate targets into short- and mid-term priorities.
• Integrated governance is the foundation for building a common architecture for NDC implementation, transparency and climate finance.

Finance

Attracting investment in support of NDC ambitions is a multidimensional challenge in which the public sector plays a key role through policy, regulatory and financial incentives and engineering which enable public and private investment in low-carbon infrastructure and climate and resilient development.

• NDCs need to be translated into investment opportunities and project pipelines developed and expanded to increase visibility and profile of options to attract finance.
• There is no single formula for attracting finance within the variety of capital and investors with differing needs to be understood and appropriate financial instruments and risk-reduction or sharing tools applied, in each specific investment context.
• Break up silos: cooperation, continued engagement and a joint-understanding of opportunities between key actors in the climate and finance communities is crucial to accelerate investment in NDC goals.
• An improved understanding is needed of how effective public budgeting for climate change actions can support the mobilisation of investment at scale, sensitise finance, planning and trade ministries and pave the way for the integration of NDCs into national and sub national planning.

Transparency

The enhanced transparency framework is backbone of the Paris Agreement. It builds trust, enables tracking of NDC implementation and informs the global stock take on reaching the long term goal.

• A data and transparency system is paramount for national coordination of NDC implementation and further supports communicating the work to different stakeholders.
• Transparency works two ways: Reporting and review not only serve accountability but also inform processes for formulating national policies and setting sectoral targets.
• Trust is crucial. Transparency is a powerful mechanism for learning and driving individual and collective ambition.

For further Information, please refer to http://www.ndcconference2017.org

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