Preah Sihanouk, 16 December 2015 – Department of Climate Change Department (DCC) of General Secretariat of the National Council for Sustainable Development (NCSD) with financial support from the Cambodia Climate Change Alliance (CCCA) organized a “Learning event for climate change technical team and practitioners” under the chairmanship of Mr. Sum Thy, Director of Department of Climate Change, General Secretariat of the NCSD with participation of over 60 climate change practitioners representating Climate Change Technical Team from concerned ministries, 8 CCCA-funded Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP), National Committee for Sub-National Democratic Development, 3 Provincial Department of Environments, Asian Development Bank and German Technical Cooperation.
The main objective of the learning event is to share lessons learnt from sectors and local authorities from their efforts during this initial period of implementation of the Cambodia Climate Change Strategic Plan (CCCSP) and Climate Change Action Plans (CCAPs), focusing on the early feedback from CCCA grant implementation. This will timely provide opportunity on how to strengthen information-sharing and networking to ensure continued learning from CCCSP and CCAP implementation, informing DCC’s current efforts in restructuring of its Climate Change Knowledge Platform.
In the opening remarks, Mr. Sum Thy, Director of Department of Climate Change, General Secretariat of the NCSD, marked that “we will need to better capitalize on lessons learnt from the implementation of climate change action plan and other climate change projects to strengthen our knowledge and information management systems”.
He further recapped the 21st Paris Conference of the Parties Agreement recently made by the members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, particularly the pursuing mobilization a new collective quantified goal of 100 billion from developed countries until 2025 and the capacities strengthening for developing countries.
The workshop was organized mostly around group discussions, with a first set of discussions focusing on earlier challenges from the implementation of grants and CCAPs; in integrating adaptation and mitigation actions in commune investment programme and; in raising awareness and sharing knowledge generated by practitioners/grantees in implementing CC response. A final plenary session will focus on the challenges ahead and how to best capitalize on CC knowledge generated by practitioners/grantees in implementing CC response.
Some of the elements identified for follow-up are: 1) climate change is in need to be integrated into sub-national planning and budgeting procedures, building on experience gained from many local level adaptation projects working with sub-national authorities; 2) there is scope to improve the knowledge management system for climate change, including easy access to basic information on climate change impacts and vulnerabilities in Cambodia, and effective sharing of available data among ministries and with non-government stakeholders. Improved collection, storage and sharing of weather data was identified as a key priority.
