Strengthening adaptation efforts in the North African and the Gulf Cooperation Council subregions

The NWP is presently supporting the World Green Economy Organization (WGEO) in closing adaptation knowledge gaps under the Lima Adaptation Knowledge Initiative (LAKI) in the North African and West Asia/ Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) subregions.

The Lima Adaptation Knowledge Initiative (LAKI) is a joint endeavor between the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to address knowledge barriers that impede the implementation and scaling up of adaptation action in subregions, categorized by common geographical characteristics and shared climatic conditions. As a demand-driven process, outcomes from the LAKI could be useful in guiding adaptation actions in countries and subregions by aligning local, regional and global resources with actual demands and needs.

The NWP is collaborating with the WGEO as the Regional Collaboration Centre (RCC) to narrow knowledge gaps in the West Asia/GCC and North Africa subregions. The RCC in Dubai was established in late 2019 as a collaboration between the UNFCCC secretariat and the WGEO. RCC Dubai is dedicated to advancing the goals of the Paris Climate Change Agreement in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

The NWP convened priority-setting workshops in the West Asia/ GCC and North African subregions in 2015 and 2017 respectively, to identify and prioritize knowledge gaps to be closed. As the next step, the NWP is working with the WGEO to:

Engage relevant institutions and experts to identify and support implementation of activities that will narrow the priority adaptation knowledge gaps for the intended knowledge users;
Disseminate the knowledge outputs to the targeted knowledge users in the subregions as well as other relevant subregions, to support regional, national and subnational adaptation planning and implementation.

Relevant institutions have already been invited to participate in a stocktake exercise, which seeks to assess ongoing efforts to address the identified knowledge gaps. The outcomes of the stocktake exercise will result in a technical workshop in the second quarter of 2020, where partners from across the region will come together to focus on the design and implementation of activities, potentially identifying cross collaborative opportunities amongst institutions working on similar initiatives or addressing common challenges. As a result, this will support the filling of knowledge gaps for different knowledge users in these subregions.

Reiterating the significance of the LAKI, Youssef Nassef, the Director of the Adaptation Programme of the UNFCCC Secretariat remarked: “through more engagement of experts in the coming period and producing the specific targeted deliverables in the form of surgical interventions at the practitioner-level, we will be able to advance considerably in adaptation by capitalizing on low-hanging fruit which are filling of the knowledge gaps.”

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