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INNOVATION POLICY 025“ AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL, MORE EFFECTIVE DOMESTIC ACTION WILL BE ESSENTIAL TO BUILD RESILIENCE AND BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN CURRENT EMISSIONS TRAJECTORIES, NDCS AND THE PARIS AGREEMENT’S MITIGATION GOALS ”FROM NEGOTIATIONS TO IMPLEMENTATION: MAJOR CHALLENGES IN THE POST-COP21 LANDSCAPEThe Paris Agreement provides a scaffold to support bottom-up implementation of its objectives by countries. It requires that countries “prepare, communicate and maintain” nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to reduce GHG emissions, which must become more ambitious over time. It places greater emphasis on adaptation, on a par with mitigation action, recognising that current efforts are insufficient. The Agreement’s qualitative, collective global goal is also accompanied by an obligation for countries to engage in adaptation planning and implement adaptation actions. In the Agreement’s accompanying decision text, developed countries extend their current commitment to mobilise US$100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020 through to 2025, while a new collective quantified goal is to be set before 2025.Importantly, the Paris Agreement provides for “an enhanced transparency framework” to help track progress on mitigation and adaptation action, as well as on financial, technology and capacity building support for developing countries. It also builds-in a number processes for the collective oversight of progress made on long-term goals. This includes a facilitative dialogue in 2018, as well as a global stocktake in 2023 and every five years thereafter. Yet, the Paris Agreement leaves a number of open questions and unresolved challenges. For example, how can the world bridge the very significant gap between current Intended NDCs and the ambitious mitigation goals of the Agreement? Given that NDCs vary in their form, how can the international community best track national and collective progress against stated intentions, and ensure an equitable distribution of effort across countries? How can countries address the very significant policy misalignments that persist in virtually all corners of the economy and work against climate ambition, whether intentionally or not?4 SUPPORTING GOVERNMENTS TO IMPLEMENT THE PARIS AGREEMENTThe OECD is working to support governments tackle these questions and advance both international and domestic action. In terms of the Agreement’s collective goals, the joint OECD-IEA Climate Change Expert Group (CCXG)5, which engages directly with Parties on technical issues within the UNFCCC process, is already supporting discussion of procedural and methodological work arising from the Paris Agreement. An immediate priority to make the Paris Agreement operational is to secure agreement on the rules and modalities governing a number of key provisions. These include provisions related to transparency, accounting and communicating progress on adaptation. In these areas, the CCXG is undertaking analytical work to identify gaps, draw lessons from existing practice, and present options for future arrangements.6 Moreover, continuing to improve the understanding and transparency of international climate finance flows remains essential. Last year, the OECD produced an up-to-date estimate of climate finance; thereby further supporting progress on what was one of the most sensitive issues in the COP21 negotiations. The OECD-Climate Policy Initiative report Climate Finance in 2013-14 and the USD 100 Billion Goal7 found that the estimated aggregate volume of public and private climate finance mobilised reached US$61.8 billion in 2014 – up from US$52.2 billion in 2013 – with an average of US$57 billion per year in 2013-14 (Figure 2). Perhaps more importantly, the report laid out its pioneering methodology to estimate the figures, encouraging further efforts to improve the transparency of such information. In addition, the OECD’s work on tracking public climate finance flows continues to actively support international efforts in improving transparency on climate finance. This is mainly done through the Development Assistance Committee statistical database for development finance, and the OECD-led Research Collaborative on Tracking Private Climate Finance.8 At the national level, more effective domestic action will be essential to build resilience and bridge Source: OECD (2015), “Climate finance in 2013-14 and the USD 100 billion goal”, a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in collaboration with Climate Policy Initiative (CPI).Source: OECD analysis. Note: Numbers in this figure may not sum to the totals due to rounding.Figure 2: Mobilised climate finance in 2013 and 2014, by funding source (USD billions)Bilateral public financeMultilateral public finance (attributed)Export creditsPrivate co-finance mobilised (attributed)