The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)in partnership with the Department of Environment (DoE) and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), organized a closing workshop of the project “Strengthening capacity for monitoring environmental emissions under the Paris Agreement in Bangladesh” today in Dhaka atDoE Auditorium. USD 2 million (GEF support and Govt. co-finance) project continued for three years and finished with outstanding results as of December 2023. Dr. Farhina Ahmed, Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) participated the closing workshop as the Chief Guest. Dr. Fahmida Khanom, Additional Secretary for Development Wing, MoEFCC, Sanjay Kumar Bhowmik, Additional Secretary for Climate Change, Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, Director General, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and Arnoud Hameleers, FAO Representative in Bangladesh (a.i.) attended the event as special guests; Dr. Abdul Hamid, Director General, Department of Environment chaired the event.
The Paris Agreement of 2015 established a global framework for averting dangerous climate change, which aims for keeping the global temperature far below 2°C and pursuing efforts to keep it below 1.5°C. Additionally, it strives to assist countries in their endeavors and strengthen their ability to combat climate change’s effects. Bangladesh signed Paris Agreement in 2016. Despite being a relatively small contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, Bangladesh has shown great commitment to climate governance and formulated National Adaptation Plan (NAP), Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), Delta Plan, Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan.
Achievements of the project
The project supported Bangladesh in its efforts to Paris agreement implementation in following areas: developed an integrated climate change measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) platform (mrv.eis.gov.bd) for GHG Inventory, Mitigation Actions, Adaptation Actions, and Finance tracking and reporting for Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU), Energy, Industrial Processes and Product Use (IPPU) and Waste sectors outlined in the NAP, NDC and key climate change plans and strategies. This platform is supporting the preparation of national GHG inventory, National Communication and biennial transparency report (BTR) by providing updated activity and emission factors data with a structured archiving system, updating of GHG emission, adaptation, mitigation and finance database. One of the important aspects of this platform is to bring all the relevant stakeholders on a single platform for data sharing, analysis and interpretation. Additionally, the MRV system is not only supporting the monitoring the national progress on climate action but also contributing to the informed planning, programming, resource allocation and policy making.
The project significantly improved the DoE’s capabilities, particularly on GIS analysis, statistical software operation, programming, and enhancement of IT infrastructure and GIS lab. It also established an Environmental Information System (eis.gov.bd) for DoE to compile, analyse, archive, and share environmental data including GHG emissions, air, and water quality, brick kiln, enforcement, and sea level rise.
Additionally, the project prepared a national Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) Roadmap for Bangladesh to fast-track the Paris Agreement implementation process as well as biennial transparency report (BTR) preparation and submission. The includes a concise, strategic, and participatory plan for achieving ETF requirements, enhancing technical capacity, mainstreaming climate transparency, and fosters long-term climate resilience through target setting, stakeholder engagement, adaptability, and accountability.
However, as the permanence of institutional arrangements is a prerequisite of mainstreaming regular data collection, filling national data gaps, operationalize the MRV system, meeting transparency requirement, the project, has facilitated a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between DoE and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) for data collection and sharing in the long term. This MoU will support regular data collection, sharing, archiving, and reporting of GHG emission and environmental data.
The project recognizes that building the knowledge and skills of stakeholders is essential for quality data generation, accurate emission and mitigation estimation, and standard GHG inventory preparation and reporting. In order to achieve this, the project trained more than 350government and private sector stakeholders on GHG inventory, statistical analysis, GIS analysis, database management and MRV system.
FAO will continue its technical assistance to implement the ETF roadmap as response to the request from the Government of Bangladesh, operationalize the MRV platform and carry out the climate transparency related work in Bangladesh through a proposed CBIT Phase II project, national methane reduction framework, Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation Initiative (FAST) and Hand in Hand Initiative as well as FAO’s technical cooperation program facility.
