Heading to COP30: NDC 3.0, Investments and Financing

Background
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) are the national climate commitments established by countries under the Paris Agreement (PA). They define the mitigation and adaptation actions they will take to meet the objective of limiting an average increase in global temperature to 2 ºC, with efforts to not exceed 1.5 ºC, be more resilient to climate change and guarantee sufficient financing to achieve these goals.
The NDCs are short and medium-term plans that must be updated every five years with increasingly ambitious objectives, depending on the capabilities of each country.
The region of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), with relatively little contribution to the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG), but high vulnerability to climate change, requires giving great importance to the objective of not exceeding 1.5 ºC and adaptation to the new weather conditions.
The most recent IPCC report indicates that widespread and rapid changes have occurred in all ecosystems. It tells us that anthropogenic climate change is already impacting through acute and chronic extreme weather events around the world. These impacts generate losses and damages related to nature and people. Vulnerable communities, which have historically contributed the least to current climate change, are disproportionately affected, including those in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Climate change has caused substantial damage, and increasingly irreversible losses, to terrestrial, freshwater, cryospheric, coastal and open ocean ecosystems. Hundreds of local species losses have been driven by increases in the magnitude of heat extremes with mass mortality events recorded on land and in the ocean. Impacts on some ecosystems are approaching irreversibility, such as the impacts of hydrological changes resulting from glacial retreat, or changes in some mountain ecosystems driven by thawing permafrost.
In this sense and remembering the importance of the IPCC’s own Special Report on 1.5oC, with this region being so vulnerable to climate change, we must face the challenge of presenting more ambitious NDCs, in addition to preparing for the inevitable, through plans and measures to adaptation and resilience, contributing to mitigation, with a sense of urgency.
Finance, in particular, supports the investments that are necessary for the economic transformation that means addressing climate change and the loss of biodiversity, the latter linked to the need to strengthen the resilience of our ecosystems as a critical instrument for adaptation.
The alignment of financial markets with the objectives of the SDGs and the Paris Agreement is for the benefit of the market agents themselves, financial institutions and their environment, since every day we have more evidence that the greening of finance is the best strategy for mitigating risks and taking advantage of opportunities in times where we are reaching and exceeding planetary limits, particularly climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
The expansion of ambition must be carried out realistically, understanding that the cost of inaction is greater. In this sense, it is appropriate to hold a space for conversation, exchange and reflection between ministries of finance, planning and the environment and actors from the financial and private sector around the challenge of designing, implementing and financing the most ambitious NDC 3.0 in the current economic and fiscal context that Latin America and the Caribbean is experiencing.
It is necessary to work together to develop NDCs that take advantage of the opportunities to generate socioeconomic “co-benefits” while mitigating greenhouse gases and adapting to the inevitable effects of climate change.

Aim
Generate a space for dialogue and cooperation towards Belem between representatives of the ministries of environment, planning and finance in order to establish roadmaps towards COP 30 for the financing of the new goals included in the NDC, with the support of international cooperation, based on their different offers of support.

Activities

• Presentation of report on NDC and economic plans / investment needs – lessons learned.
• Review of facts of materialization of physical and transition risks: call to action from the economy.
• Experiences in the review of the new NDCs: the countries.
• Experiences in financing new NDCs.
• Experiences of interministerial collaborations: the countries.
• Review of available support: cooperation agencies.
• Best practices: countries.
• Scenario modeling and LTS: NDCs as stepping stones.
• Route to Belem: Activation of the NDC community for the next 3/5 months.