A Decade of National Planning and Institutional Strengthening

With the CCAC’s help, Ghana aligned its national action plan on short-lived climate pollutants with its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) and included several measures to reduce short-lived climate pollutants.

The plan outlines 16 measures to mitigate short-lived climate pollutants, including getting people access to 2 million fuel-efficient cookstoves. Other measures include having ten percent of electricity come from renewable sources like solar, reducing forest burning by 40 percent (a practice used for farmland and also to produce charcoal for cooking), and implementing soot-free buses, particularly in the capital city Accra.

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Daniel Benefor, who worked on the CCAC national planning process for the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency, said it helped ensure increased buy-in because it brought everyone who mattered to the table – the Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Energy, Ministry of Land and Natural Resources, the National Development Planning Commision, the Ministry of Finance, and Ministry of Health.  

They collated relevant local data and used the ‘Long-range Energy Planning system with Integrated Benefits Calculator (LEAP IBC)’, an integrated energy planning and climate change mitigation assessment tool, to calculate the benefits of emissions reductions. 

“The process helped us discuss and agree which data sets to use and which information was important to include in the analysis,” Benefor said. “It is important to build consensus from the outset because once you have results from the analysis someone needs to own the results.  And it was these very ministries that needed to own the results and create policies in their respective sectors and then implement these policies.” 

The work also helped increase government buy-in by showing how SLCP reduction directly benefits Ghana and Ghanaians, including through improved local air quality, public health, and food production. Benefor said that while ministries usually look at the development benefits of their actions, they never thought of assessing the co-benefits.

“Ghana is a developing country, and we have a clearly defined agenda to help make Ghanaians prosperous, but that agenda must happen on a pathway that is sustainable,” Benefor said. “The planning analysis brought the climate perspective to this long-term agenda. It was interesting to see the extent of the benefits we could get for Ghanaians by honouring our existing commitments and implementing additional policies. We saw that despite being a small country with low emissions that our actions also contribute to the global climate effort. The process helped us provide decision makers with evidence of climate and air quality impacts and the many benefits of acting.”

Benefor said Ghana was now focused on finding resources to implement their plans effectively. “This is the only way that we can get the benefits that we have envisaged,” he said.

   

The Maldives is a prime example of a country that will experience multiplying effects when it comes to air pollution and human health as a result of their ambitious action on climate change — important positive byproducts given that the Maldives has made a negligible contribution to the emissions creating the climate crisis. 

The Maldives is made up of 1,200 islands but almost half the population lives on just one. Male, the capital city, is one of the densest cities in the world and has an air pollution problem fueled by cars, ferries, and burning trash.

The CCAC has supported the country’s Ministry of the Environment and Ministry of Transportation to act on this crisis by building the capacity of these institutions to understand the scope and sources of the problem and to identify priorities for action over the past seven years.

“We want to monitor and understand what kind of air we’re breathing in. We want to ensure the air remains clean and healthy for our population,” said Dr. Hassan Rasheed Hussein, the country’s Minister of the Environment. “We want the Maldives to have the best air for the people, that’s our ambition.”

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The CCAC first helped the Maldives do this by funding the establishment of an air quality division in the Ministry of the Environment. The Coalition then worked with this division to develop the country’s first ever National Action Plan on Air Pollutants which outlines 28 mitigation measures to tackle emissions in three major sectors: waste, electricity, and transport. The Action Plan was endorsed not only by the Ministry of the Environment, a critical step in ensuring implementation, it was also launched by the Ministry of Transport.

A full 22 out of 28 of these measures were then integrated into the Maldives’ NDCs. If these are fully implemented, they will reduce fine particulate (PM 2.5) emissions by 35 per cent, and greenhouse gas emissions by 24 per cent.

Another major outcome of the National Action Plan was that it identified the air pollution benefits that the Maldives would get from its climate change mitigation activities, showing that these actions wouldn’t just reduce the country’s negligible contribution to climate change, it would also reduce particulate matter (the pollutant with the largest effect on respiratory and cardiovascular health) by 60 per cent.

The National Action Plan identified the actions that would lead to the largest reductions in air pollution across the Maldives, but particularly in highly polluted Male, while also reducing climate impacts. The two key actions identified were the improvement of fuel quality and the implementation and enforcement of vehicle and vessel emission standards, which the Maldives will be implementing based on the air quality plan.

Speaking at a ceremony to launch the plan in 2019, Dr. Hussein said the government of the Maldives was committed to taking concrete and strategic action to address the issues of air pollution to protect the environment and safeguard human health. “Until recently, scientific and political conversations around climate change and air pollution had taken place separately. However, it is increasingly recognized that both issues are closely linked.”

“The development of the National Action Plan on Air Pollutants has helped the Maldives achieve three things,” said Aminath Maiha Hameed, who worked on the plan at the Ministry of Environment. “We now know what  air pollutants are emitted by different sources and can now track this as the Action Plan is implemented. We have also shown that efforts to meet our international climate change commitments can provide substantial local benefits to Maldivians through improved air quality. Finally, we have a clear roadmap of the additional actions needed to further improve air quality.”

   

Côte D’Ivoire is an example of the lasting, and multiplying, effect of the CCAC’s national planning process, which brings together different government ministries that used to work in isolation. By building connections across the ministries — as well as nonprofits and academia — Côte D’Ivoire was able to develop a short-lived climate pollutant plan that had widespread government buy-in and maximum developmental impact.

This relatively small country in West Africa suffers disproportionately from air pollution. According to the World Health Organisation, it caused 34,000 premature deaths in 2016, which included 8,000 children.

In 2015, the CCAC and the country’s Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development started working together to develop a National SLCP Action Plan.

With support from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), the team developed an integrated analysis of SLCPs and greenhouse gases to better understand the common sources which helped identify five priority areas: transportation, household cooking and lighting, industry, waste, oil and gas, and agriculture. After analysing each sector they developed sector-specific mitigation measures and synthesised them into a National SLCP Action Plan which has the potential to reduce black carbon emissions by 59 per cent and methane by 34 per cent.

That technical analysis was then used as the basis for Cote D’Ivoire’s NDC revision process.

“The supporting and strengthening and enhancing capacity within Cote D’Ivoire has had a lasting effect on their ability to plan and increase actions on climate change and air pollution more broadly. It’s had a bigger effect than just the development of that SLCP plan in isolation,” said Malley. “This is really important because it creates consistency between these different planning processes that countries undertake — you're no longer in a position where you're having one set of consultants develop an analysis for climate change, one set of consultants for SLCP planning and air quality. You can instead use this analysis to feed into multiple planning processes, which means that it’s more nationally-owned and that there’s more likelihood you will develop a plan that is able to be implemented because there’s a large amount of buy-in by different stakeholders in different sectors.”

Just as integrating climate and clean air work has multiplying effects, so does collaboration across sectoral Ministries, Departments and Agencies, which is why the in-depth collaboration across government to develop this plan was so integral to its success.

   

Nigeria exemplified the ways that the co-benefits of mitigating short-lived climate pollutants can help raise climate ambition when it included a dedicated section on SLCPs in its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), citing that bold action could save 30,000 lives every year from health issues like asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease. The NDC committed to doing so by reducing black carbon by 42 per cent, methane by 28 per cent, and HFCs by 2 per cent by 2030, all of which will not only improve air pollution in Nigeria but will also help reduce the country’s climate impacts.

“Nigeria is committed to playing its part to mitigate global climate change,” said Halima Bawa-Bwari, Acting Director of the Climate Change Department in Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of the Environment. “However, it is important that Nigerians also benefit from implementing this commitment. The actions in the residential sector in particular can deliver tangible health benefits, especially for Nigerian children, which makes the implementation of these actions even more important.”

Integrating climate change and air pollution into Nigeria’s existing development priorities— such as reducing poverty and improving health— means that the benefits of Nigeria’s national planning multiplies. 

“Integrating climate change into planning and decision-making processes is a crucial tool to ensure climate change adaptation and poverty reduction,” said Bala Bappa, the CCAC’s National Planning coordinator in Nigeria. “Mainstreaming climate change into national policies, plans, and development projects contributes to reducing vulnerability to climate impacts and variability, increasing the adaptive capacity of communities facing climate impacts and ensuring sustainable development.”

   

The CCAC’s national planning process helps countries prioritise climate and clean air actions, so that each country can focus on the most cost-effective and impactful steps for their national context. With the support of the CCAC, Colombia increased its 2030 climate change ambitions and integrated new targets to simultaneously improve air quality and health. This included a greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 51 per cent and black carbon by 40 per cent — an uncommon target in NDCs that Colombia identified after CCAC-supported research on Colombia’s emissions profile.

“The 40 per cent target to reduce black carbon is based on a robust assessment of existing laws, policies, and plans across all major source sectors,” said Francisco Charry, Director of Climate Change and Risk Management of the Ministry of Environment of Colombia. “Half this target will be achieved through black carbon emission reductions from our greenhouse gas mitigation actions, and half through an additional set of actions that specifically target major black carbon source sectors.”

As part of the CCAC’s national planning work, Colombia estimated the economic, environmental, and social benefits of reducing black carbon and particulate matter emissions using different mitigation scenarios. This was made possible by the Coalition’s Long-range Energy Alternative Planning (LEAP) – Integrated Benefits Calculator (IBC), a suite of tools developed to help countries assess and prioritise policy options and measures, including how to develop a national SLCP planning process. 

The next step was more precise measurement and analysis of the sector’s emissions. Colombia was one of the first Latin American countries to deploy black carbon measurements in the brick sector using a CCAC-supported measurement protocol and a Ratnoze portable sampling system, which measures solid fuel combustion emissions. 

“The CCAC support has been important, without its help we wouldn’t be talking about black carbon goals or other pollutant goals,” said John Henry Melo Pineda, the Coordinator of the NDC Update Process at Colombia’s Ministry of Environment, adding that the CCAC has helped make short-lived climate pollutants a priority. “I think the CCAC has been essential in this country to setting black carbon mitigation goals.”

“The CCAC has been essential to letting high-level decision-makers know about this issue, which was unknown just a little while ago. Now, at the highest levels, they know what black carbon is, why it's important, and why it is necessary to link air pollution and climate change,” said Pineda.

    

Mongolia’s capital city of Ulaanbaatar, where almost half of the country’s population lives, has some of the worst air pollution in the world, with concentrations almost six times higher than the World Health Organisation recommends. This is partially because the city is so reliant upon coal, using it not only for power stations but also for heating homes over the extremely cold winters. 

With the support of the CCAC, Mongolia developed an integrated assessment of the air pollution benefits Mongolia could achieve through its revised NDC process. The report titled "Opportunities from taking integrated actions on air pollution and climate change in Mongolia" identified major sources of SLCP emissions, such as agriculture, transport, and coal consumption for household heating and cooking, and for electricity and heat generation.

This assessment then outlined eight mitigation measures which serve as the basis for the country’s revised NDC, which included acting on heat generation, industry and buildings, and reducing the number of livestock in agriculture. If fully implemented, these actions could reduce black carbon by 12 per cent and particulate matter by 9 per cent, numbers that could increase to a 26 per cent reduction in black carbon and a 17 per cent reduction in particulate matter if both the climate change commitments and the air pollution actions are achieved.

“It really highlighted that there was a local benefit that was comparable to the reductions in greenhouse gases that could be achieved from implementing this updated NDC. The increase in ambition also increased the ambition in terms of improving air quality,” said Malley. “This is significant because in Mongolia’s voluntary national review of their achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals the prime minister specifically identified air pollution as being the key development issue that they want to try and achieve. And the results of the initial SNAP work in Mongolia was that climate change mitigation was a route to achieving that.”

“The air pollution benefits that can be achieved by implementing Mongolia’s revised NDC are on top of the existing actions being taken or planned that specifically tackle air quality in Ulaanbaatar,” said Dr, Damdin Davgadorj, assessment lead author. “When we evaluated the implementation of Mongolia’s NDC and planned air quality actions, the expected benefits were even greater.”

In 2020 and 2021, the CCAC built on that work and started looking into the by developing long term low emissions development scenarios for Mongolia, creating the first long term projections of emissions for Mongolia to 2050 based on the country’s 2050 vision. Without action, these emissions will be substantial, but using the CCAC’s national planning support they found that by transitioning away from coal, reducing methane emissions in livestock, improving waste management, making transport cleaner and more efficient Mongolia could cut its SLCP emissions in half.