First Regular Session of the UNDP Executive Board
Achim Steiner Statement Excerpt
...On climate change, we demonstrated that we can lift our game beyond the sum of our projects, launching the Climate Promise last September, focused on Ambition, Acceleration and Mobilization.
Through the Promise, UNDP will help 100 countries to enhance their NDCs with a demonstrated increase in ambition of their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) by 2020, in time to submit before COP26 in Glasgow.
Making $25m available for this support it is one of UNDP’s direct contributions to the NDCs Partnership. We are working closely with key partners such as Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, the EU, the Green Climate Fund (GCF), IRENA, UNEP, FAO, UN-Habitat and others.
We are discussing enhancement with more than 120 countries, and support is already underway in in 88 countries, including 38 Least Developed Countries, 38 SIDS and 12 high-emitters.
A new phase of the Climate Promise will be launched this month: Mission 1.5 is a new mobile game to engage people on climate solutions and help them to choose actions for their country’s NDC. We will make the results available to governments starting this summer to directly inform the NDC enhancement process.
UNDP’s climate action support also extended beyond NDCs in 2019, working in and across our signature solutions. For example,
· on resilience, UNDP helped 2.5 million people to access early warning systems and climate or disaster information, 54 countries to mainstream climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction in their national;
· on gender, we worked with 97 countries to strengthen women’s leadership and decision making in environmental management and with 74 countries to integrate gender into environment and climate policies, plans and frameworks; and,
· On governance, with an integrated SDG team, UNDP worked hand-in-hand with the Uzbek government to address a number of SDG challenges in the shrinking Aral Sea region of Uzbekistan, building on local-government-led efforts to promote ecological and technological innovations in the basin.
We take such an integrated approach because, as we will discuss this afternoon in the context of the ‘Super Year’ of climate and nature action in 2020, we can no longer afford a false calculus of ‘environment versus economy’.
UNDP is working hard to provide that support. For example, with financing from the environment and climate vertical funds approved in 2019, 37.5 million people are expected to benefit from UNDP engagement in 44 countries.
These integrated projects will help countries to avoid 275 million tons of CO2 emissions. That’s the equivalent of taking 59 million cars off the road for a year.