COPA´s work is in alignment with the key elements of the Paris Agreement on climate change
The Paris Agreement was adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21) in December 2015 and entered into force the following year. It is a legally binding international treaty on climate change with the goal to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.
To achieve this long-term temperature goal, countries aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to achieve a climate neutral world by mid-century. To enable developing countries to counteract climate change, strengthen resilience and improve the ability to adapt to climate change impacts, financing mechanisms are to be provided.
Under the Paris Agreement, each country must submit national climate action plans through the so-called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the UNFCCC secretariat. The NDCs are submitted, assessed, and revised in a 5- year cycle with start in year 2020. They should reflect increasingly ambitious climate actions to reduce national emissions and adapt to the global temperature rise and other impacts of climate change.
The work in COPA can benefit countries’ NDCs in different ways, but specifically:
1. The NDCs require accurate and reliable data about the current levels of GHG emission in a country, to establish the baseline for the mitigation ambitions. Here COPA may support countries with methodologies and estimations on current levels of emissions in the RAC sector.
2. COPA work can facilitate countries’ NDC revisions and ambition increase through specifications of the mitigation’s potential stored in ODS and HFC banks.
3. Additionally, COPA may contribute to countries’ NDC target formulations and division in conditional and unconditional targets with cost estimates for the emission reduction potential within ODS and HFCs bank management.
Source: The Paris Agreement | United Nations
