The Climate Change Competence Centre of Morocco has just launched a process aimed at strengthening the capacities of regional actors in the framework of the implementation of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
How to make international climate funds more accessible? This is a question that remains topical for the territorial actors of the Moroccan kingdom. Through the Climate Change Competence Centre, the 4C Morocco, the government has initiated an integrated process of diagnosis, capacity building and assistance in setting up and financing green projects in five pilot regions of the Kingdom. These are Marrakech-Safi, Béni Mellal-Khénifra and Casablanca-Settat, Draâ-Tafilalet and Souss-Massa. Since the beginning of July 2018, this programme has already been implemented in the first three regions. Its priorities are the screening of climate-sensitive projects on regional development programmes, as well as other planning documents, and capacity building of regional actors with regard to access to climate finance. This programme is presented as a guide for those actors in the structuring and submission of eligible projects that comply with the NDCs of Morocco.
There has been remarkable progress on the ground. The first three workshops held so far have thus provided stakeholders in the sector with the necessary information on the funding opportunities they could benefit from. They were also given detailed eligibility criteria to convince international donors of green finance. The first term also made it possible to examine projects from territorial planning documents in order to identify those that could be developed and structured in order to make them eligible for climate finance.
The capacity building programme will be carried out with the support of the 4C project, the IKI (International Climate Initiative, under the German Ministry of Ecology), the GIZ (German Agency for International Cooperation), and in partnership with the State Secretariat for Sustainable Development.
NDCs, a significant contribution to protecting the environment
It all started with COP 21, held in Paris in 2015, and especially with Morocco’s ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016. The kingdom had then defined a series of public policies to limit global warming. “The NDCs of Morocco is an enhanced version of the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) that Morocco submitted to the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on June 5, 2015. Morocco’s responsibility for climate change is quite low, but it has nevertheless insisted on developing its own NDCs, which also offers many opportunities. For the Kingdom, global ambitions to combat climate change call for a substantial commitment by all parties to mitigation, adaptation, means of implementation, cooperative approaches and transparency. To respond favourably to the recommendation in Article 3 of the Paris Agreement, the NDCs reflects the Kingdom’s desire to fight climate change without weakening. A struggle that has only just begun…
Luchelle Feukeng
