FAO supports national representatives from NENA to attend NAP Expo

25 August, Gabarone, Botswana – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has provided support and funding for the attendance of several national representatives from across the region in the UNFCCC National Adaptation Plans (NAP) Expo held in Gaborone, Botswana, in August 2022.

With the African COP27 just months away, FAO highlighted the need for representatives from ministries of agriculture and agricultural and environmental research units from Egypt, Mauritania, Palestine, Sudan and Yemen to participate in capacity development on adaptation planning in the conference.

With countries at different stages of their adaptation planning processes, the Expo brought around 400 participants from all over the world to foster partnerships and share experiences in developing and implementing adaptation plans, including at the sectoral level.

For Sudan, where a Green Climate Fund (GCF) NAP readiness project is well under implementation, the focus was on sessions related to the use of geospatial and open data, innovative ways of documenting the NAP process such as the use of RStudio and Rmarkdown, and learning about the various platforms for sharing best practices and lessons learnt on NAPs. Sudan’s NAP Readiness project is supporting the country in tackling the lack of climate change data and impact assessments and strengthening capacities in impact modeling at national and state-levels.

Representatives from Yemen saw the benefits of NAP development in opening up the window to addressing and financing adaptation priorities for the country. They found an encouraging and collaborative atmosphere as countries shared challenges and entry points for aligning their NAP processes with the implementation of their countries’ nationally-determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement. There was no one-size-fits-all solution, but coordination and communication were key.

From Egypt, which is soon to host COP27, Dr. Tarek Shalaby from the Ministry of Environment noted that the improvement of monitoring, review, and verification (MRV) systems at the national level would improve the planning for national adaptation actions, especially in the most vulnerable sectors, including agriculture. This was a lesson taken from the session organized by FAO and UNDP under the “Scaling up Climate Ambition on Land Use and Agriculture through Nationally Determined Contributions and National Adaptation Plans”(SCALA) programme:Step-by-step guidance to enable transformative approaches to NAP/NDC implementation in the agriculture and land use sectors. Egypt is one of the countries in the programme.

Participants from the region appreciated the need to include financing for adaptation in national budgets, and greater coordination among sectors as well as with the private sector towards national climate change processes. Going forward, they called for a strengthened network on adaptation planning, one that ensures the integration of sectoral priorities and gender-responsive approaches in the region, with more regular meetings, peer-to-peer learning, and interactive sharing.