In the afternoon of 08 April 2014, the Ministry of Environment organized the CCCA’s Program Support Board (PSB) Meeting which was presided over by H.E. Say Samal, Minister of Environment and Chairperson of the CCCA PSB. The meeting was attended by PSB members from Ministry of Water Resource and Meteorology, Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries, Ministry of Economy and Finance, and representatives from the development partners including European Union, Sweden Embassy and UNDP, with 32 participants in total. The main objectives of the meeting were to review the implementation of the CCCA programme phase 1 (2010-2014), and the progress in preparing CCCA proposal for phase 2 (2014-2019) for PSB’s review and approval.

In his welcome remarks, H.E. Minister underlined the commitments of the Ministry of Environment in environmental quality protection, biodiversity conservation and ensuring sustainable livelihoods. He further stressed on the importance of environmental policy formulation based on scientific research, including climate change research, and on the need to develop education programmes to support the training of environmentalists and climate change experts at the university level.

H.E. Minister also appreciated the key achievements of the CCCA including the development of the Cambodia Climate Change Strategic Plan 2014-2023, the initial Climate Change Legal Framework Development, preparation of the Climate Change Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, Climate Change Financing Framework, Cambodia’s positions for CoP 19 of UNFCCC, and implementation of climate change training for all municipal/provincial authorities.

Mr. Tin Ponlok, Deputy General Director of the Ministry of Environment, added that CCCA provided grants to20 climate change pilot projects (14 projects implemented by government institutions while 6projects by NGOs) in a total amount of6 million USD. There are16,000 households acquired direct benefits from the projects, more than 35,000 beneficiaries received adaptation training and about 17% of targets households applied adaptation technique. The grant covers implementation of pilot projects more than 50 different districts.

The meeting also discussed the proposed CCCA phase 2 in which development partners agreed to provide grant of 12.4 million USD for the period of 2014-2019, focusing on three main drivers as follow:

• Strengthening the governance of climate finance: institutional and legal framework, accountability framework/M&E, support to line ministries and agencies for key activities in their climate change action plans, including grants.
• Harnessing domestic and external, public and private resources in support of the CCCSP: Government-donor coordination, advisory support on financing modalities/resource mobilization, cost-benefit analysis, tracking of climate change expenditure, dialogue with private sector, international negotiations, accreditation with Adaptation Fund and Green Climate Fund.
• Building human and technological capital for the climate change response: grants for innovative projects including NGOs/Private Sector, partnership with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport and universities on climate change education, knowledge management system and learning events, standards for CC awareness materials.

The meeting also discussed possibility of strengthening cooperation with the ADB-supported Strategic Programme for Climate Resilience (SPCR) in developing a detail vulnerability map, in collaboration with Ministry of Planning to monitor Climate Change indicators contained in the National Strategic Development Plan, 2014-2018, and support mainstreaming climate change into sub-national level.

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