How does reporting on climate mitigation benefit developing countries?

What is the TRANSGOV-project all about?

Gupta: The project is about transparency in the sense of how countries report on what they are doing on their climate commitments. This is called the transparency framework under the Paris agreement. This agreement has nationally determined contributions, which are voluntary but transparency about these contributions is mandatory. You have to report on whether you're making progress on these voluntary targets, and the idea is that through such reporting, there can be accountability and enhanced trust. Our research project looks a bit critically at these assumptions. How does reporting actually help in making progress on tacking climate change?

So what has this to do with Ethiopia?

The framework calls also for developing countries to enhance their reporting, including Ethiopia. This is a least developed country, or LDC, and our question is, does it make sense for a least developed country to focus its reporting around mitigation? A country like Ethiopia has very low emission levels compared to the global average but major challenges with the consequences of climate change. Droughts, pressure on food production and consequences for food security are much more at stake. So, Ethiopia’s priorities are in climate adaption, but the mandatory reporting obligations focus on mitigation. The country has to invest resources, time and attention into developing a reporting infrastructure on mitigation with the consequence of having less money available for reporting on or taking action on adaptation.

What did you do to find answers?

We went to Ethiopia for two weeks, to engage with stakeholders and transparency practitioners, those who generate these reports. But also those who are supposed to be using these reports to help make climate policy. To ask the question: do you communicate with each other? Do you even know that these reports exist? Has anybody read one of these reports? How have they helped shape domestic climate policy? We organized a stakeholder workshop and brought about 30 people together. We even had the Minister of State who is responsible for climate policy at our workshop. And we basically asked participants to reflect on the current state of reporting and whether it is fit for purpose in the Ethiopian context.

What are your findings? Do you get the feeling that Ethiopian transparency practitioners found its burdensome to put all this effort into reporting, while the domestic benefits are unclear?

Well, the answer to that question is a bit complicated. Those who are responsible for writing these reports, they find the process useful, because they are the ones who are actively part of the reporting system. In a sense they are benefiting from this process because they get a capacity building project, they can develop their data management systems. So even if the broader priorities of the country are different, this particular group of people are invested in the reporting system, in this process. But we also find that certain information about country priorities that is important to include may be sidelined within this system.

Another insight we got is that because the global reporting focus is on mitigation, the money that's available internationally is also to support reporting on mitigation, with adaptation reporting remaining voluntary. . So then your options become: do you go for what's on the table or not? It requires additional domestic effort and expertise to even request money for reporting around adaptation. So often it is not a choice.

But Ethiopia's priority is with adaption, so what should they do?

What Ethiopia is now trying to do is to leverage global priorities to somehow tailor them to generate domestic benefits. Ethiopia has a number of flagship climate adaptation programs. They are now trying to highlight the mitigation co-benefits of these ongoing adaptation programs. So if it's about sustainable land management or revitalizing degraded areas by planting trees, the original intent of these domestic programs is adaptation and increasing resilience of these systems. But if you can calculate the carbon sequestered through these processes, then you might be able to say: this is also an ambitious mitigation program and then try to use that framing to attract international finance to support this. So adaptation programs can be presented having mitigation co-benefits and vice versa.

But again, this requires a shift in focus to draw attention to the mitigation benefits of domestic climate action. It may or may not lead to the finance that Ethiopia wants to attract, especially if it requires participating in global carbon trading markets. Ideally, they would simply attract grant-based funds for their adaptation priorities.

You are present at COP29 in Baku. What are you doing there?

We've gone to the last two COP-conferences, in Egypt and in Dubai, and both times we organized side events. Our goal was to introduce our critical questions and shake up the narrative a bit. I think we have succeeded in getting countries to engage with the question of domestic benefits and burdens at these sessions. This time we decided not to organize another side events, because countries are now developing new reports according to enhanced transparency obligations. Our goal this time is to go there to follow the events around encouraging countries to be prepared to submit their reports. Basically, to study what is the current state of play around the start of this new system. In a few years, the reporting scheme for the COP will be evaluated. We hope to contribute to reconsidering a reporting system that will prioritize information on adaptation as well.

What are some findings from TRANSGOV so far?

This project has been running for four years. So far, our insights from South Africa and India are that it can be quite a burdensome exercise to comply with all of these reporting obligations, even as both countries are engaging in good faith and have adhered to all reporting requirements. Specifically, the claim that domestic decision making will be improved if you report to the global regime, is questionable. Domestic policy making to date does not per se rely on data reported globally. And this idea that if you report, you will attract climate finance for your activities has also not panned out in practice. Our conclusions within TRANSGOV are that the global reporting system needs to be revamped in two ways: it should generate comparable information from developed countries about the fairness and ambition levels of their individual climate targets; and it should be more targeted for developing countries, to allow a focus on core country-specific priorities, whether these are mitigation, adaptation or loss and damage.