COP29: How communities could help capture the full impact of climate change

COP is full of acronyms (who can recall that COP itself stands for 'conference of parties'?), and so the discussion of NDCs and BTRs that the parties needed to report back to the UNFCCC started out rather confusing. It soon crystallised into exactly what I was after though.

To start with, let’s do a brief vocabulary check for those (like me) who are not familiar with all those acronyms:

• UNFCCC is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; under the United Nations umbrella, it is the core treaty that underpins the collective global response to climate change, including the 2015 Paris Agreement which set the aim to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees.
• NDCs are Nationally Determined Contributions – mitigation or adaptation activities that all Parties – according to the Paris Agreement – must update every five years. The next round is due in 2025.
• BTRs are Biennial Transparency Reports, which summarise the parties’ progress against the NDCs, including – among other details - activities, policies and financial decisions. The first round of these reports is due at the end of 2024. 13 reports have been submitted to date, including that of the European Union, and COP29 host country Azerbaijan.
• The SDGs are Sustainable Development Goals, which were agreed by the United Nations in 2015 to achieve “peace and prosperity for people and the planet.” They are implemented through a variety of indicators with detailed data, which are collated and reported on by the UN Statistics Division.

Participatory research initiatives, such as those supported in the IMPETUS project, have been primarily focused on contributing to the SDGs. Because participatory research is grounded in communities, it makes sense for those communities to engage in discussion about the different themes of the SDGs, such as poverty, health, gender equality, or biodiversity, and there is ample evidence that they can make strong contributions to measuring progress against the goals.

When both frameworks – SDGs and NDCs – were put in place in 2015, there was much discussion about aligning NDC and SDG indicators. It seems natural that with two key frameworks looking to support sustainability, though with different foci, there should be some overlap. And indeed, there is, as the NDC-SDG Connections initiative highlights. However, while there is overlap in the data, the processes for both sets of goals and indicators remain siloed, which leads to a lack of integration and loss of potential efficiency gains. Activating those synergies could be a powerful vehicle for both climate and sustainability action.

This discussion, alas, has barely made its way into the participatory research community, which is focused on sustainability. Becoming familiar with and talking to policy makers about NDC and BTR contributions alongside SDGs could make a much stronger argument and empower communities even further. This is not least because the existing NDC measures do not consider sufficiently diverse and granular data to capture the impact of climate change on all level of society, with women and indigenous communities remaining especially underrepresented. Participatory research can help to change this – and it should.