Zambia embarks on ambitious greenhouse gas emission cut , Mpampi tells COP25

The Ministry of National Development Planning has told the delegates to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) that Zambia has developed ambitious Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emission.

National Designated Authority (NDA) National Coordinator, Francis Mpampi, said Zambia’s NDCs are aimed at reducing by at least 38000 GtCO2 (gigatonnes of carbon dioxide) equivalent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which will require at least US$50 Billion by 2030.

Mr. Mpampi said out of the budget, about US$15 Billion is expected to be locally generated and about US$35 Billion from external resources.

Mr. Mpampi said this when he participated on a panel discussion organized by the Governments of Denmark and Netherlands, the Republic of Korea in conjunction and the Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals 2030 (P4G) – a global network that accelerates, funds and recognizes innovative public-private partnerships driving green growth – at COP25 in Madrid, Spain.

Mr. Mpampi said the sectors covered in the nationally determined contribution include Agriculture, Water, Transport, Health and Energy.

“P4G partnerships are helping Zambia realise these ambitious targets through support being given to Africa GreenCo, an intermediary that will be introduced in the electricity subsector,” Mr. Mpampi said. “Africa GreenCo will buy power from Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer (IPP), aggregate and supply to ZESCO and others. What this will do is to instill confidence in the sector. Reduce the risk and allow more investment in renewable energy. The partnerships, therefore, are important to help Zambia achieve climate-resilient and low carbon development trajectory.”

At a side-event themed: Guide for Integrated National Planning in Africa to mainstream the SDGs, Agenda 2063, NDCs, DRR and the New Deal Programme, Mr. Mpampi explained that Zambia had changed its planning approach from sectoral (silo) to cluster.

“This new approach entails that different Government institutions get together to contribute to a particular development outcome. With this approach it is easy to mainstream agendas such as SDGs, Climate Change, Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), Agenda 2063 in our development plan,” Mr. Mpampi said. “UNDP was called upon to assess the level of integration using the Rapid Integrated Assessment (RIA), which enabled us to identify the gaps and this was taken on board when developing the Implementation Plan for the Seventh National Development Plan (7NDP). Today we stand at 86 percent alignment with the SDGs broken down as follows: Fully aligned 75 per cent and partially aligned 11 per cent, thereby leaving 14 per cent of SDGs targets not aligned.”

He said in the challenges Zambia experienced were the inadequate capacity to develop the tools as well as ability to incorporate the Agenda.

“Going forward, we are certain that we will have more personnel acquiring hands-on experience. Zambia stands ready to work with UNDP, AfDB, AUDA-NEPAD in making the mainstreaming of SDGs, Agenda 2063, NDCs, DRR and New Deal a reality not only in Zambia but across the developing countries,” the NDA national coordinator said.

Speaking at another side-event co-organised by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and Climate Investment Fund (CIF), Mr. Mpampi said transformational change was important to achieve large-scale impacts.

“GCF can continue to build on its strong foundation by way of getting good practices such as establishment of the Transformational Change Learning Partnership (TCLP) like CIF to facilitate a collaborative, evidence-based learning process on transformational change within the GCF context,” said Mr. Mpampi. “Other things we are learning from the experiences of CGF and CIF, is the need to continue to promote country-led programmatic approach, explicit consideration of transformational change at the design phase; large-scale investments utilising a range of grants and concessional financing tools; promote delivery of financing through Direct Access to promote the country ownership principle and to review countries’ capacities from time to time and deal with issues on cases by case basis.”

The COP25, convened from 2-13 December 2019, focused on resolving the outstanding issues in the Climate Package such as provisions under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, public registries for Nationally Determined Contributions, work of WHO on climate change and human health, international climate finance, least developed countries (LDCs), gender and climate change, as well as climate-health nexus, among other issues.