Cop26 Glasgow

Ricardo leads way on COP26 preparations with new project wins

22 Sep 2020

Ricardo is supporting six countries in their preparations for the COP26 climate summit next year, providing assistance with Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and long-term low emission development strategies (LT-LEDS).

With Climate Week NYC 2020 taking place in New York this week, attention is once again focusing on the countdown to the crucial COP26 next year and how countries can put climate change at the heart of the recovery from the global Coronavirus pandemic.

In the run up to COP21 in 2015, which launched the Paris Agreement, Ricardo had been supporting governments around the world in developing their initial NDCs, and has continued to work at the national-level to enable implementation of the legally-binding and critical climate change commitments.

As part of the implementation support Ricardo experts are helping countries to prepare for the enhanced transparency framework, under the Paris Agreement, to track progress towards NDC targets, and have assessed climate vulnerabilities and prioritised adaptation options in countries such as India. The team also ran the initial Climate Finance Accelerator that was key in supporting private sector investment into NDC projects.

The latest NDC support, sees Ricardo once again at the forefront of this work, with its team of technical climate change experts advising a range of countries, and key stakeholders, on the ‘green recovery’ and on formulating and implementing climate plans. The six projects supported by Ricardo are assisting the governments of Colombia, Jordan, Namibia, Nigeria, Palestine and Uganda in formulating their NDCs and LT-LEDS.

James Harries, a principal consultant for Ricardo’s Climate Action Planning and Transparency team, commented: “We’ve been part of the Paris Agreement process since the start and supported over 15 countries to develop their initial NDCs. Since the COP21 we’ve continued to provide support to enable realization of their climate commitments, from developing NDC implementation roadmaps and sectoral action plans, and building capacity for delivery, through to developing market mechanisms such as the Urban Crediting Methodology. COP26 next year is going to be all about ambition and enhancing NDCs to deliver greater emissions reductions - it’s really exciting to be heavily involved in this process.”

Ricardo is also heavily involved in capacity building and thought leadership around NDCs and LT-LEDS. Following previous guidance documents that Ricardo prepared on preparing and implementing NDCs, Ricardo has also recently delivered workshops on NDC enhancement and LT-LEDS for small island developing states, and is currently working with the German international development agency, GIZ, to prepare guidance on structuring updated NDCs.

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