2nd PNG Energy Sub-Technical Working Committee Meeting

The Climate Change and Development Authority (CCDA) is mandated to prepare and submit to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). NDCs embody efforts by each country to reduce national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change. NDCs are the central element of the Paris Agreement and the main climate change policy framework for Parties to the UNFCCC. A Party’s contribution to address climate change is nationally determined according to its national circumstances and priorities. This terminology was adopted to emphasise the bottom-up approach.

Details of the NDC are provided in Article 4 of the Paris Agreement where Each Party shall prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions that it intends to achieve. Parties shall pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving the objectives of such contributions. Developing countries should continue enhancing their mitigation efforts, and are encouraged to move over time towards economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets in the light of different national circumstances. And each Party shall communicate their NDC every five years.

In order to meet its obligation under the Paris Agreement, CCDA prepared and communicated PNG’s NDC in 2016 which captures mitigation contributions from the energy and forestry sector. Mitigation contribution from the energy sector was for electricity to be 100% generated from renewable energy. CCDA is now in the process of preparing PNG’s enhanced NDC and plans on enhancing mitigation contributions from energy sector. This includes sector specific targets with actions to achieving these targets.

In order to do so CCDA established the Energy Sub-Technical Working Committee (ESTWC) where one of the roles was to provide technical guidance for the preparation of PNG’s enhanced NDC specifically for the mitigation contributions from the energy sector. CCDA held a first ESTWC meeting where the objectives were for the members to agree on the data source to use for establishing energy sector targets and also to present to the members mitigation actions in the energy sector in the zero draft of the enhanced NDC. One of the outcomes in this meeting was that the members present agreed on what data source to use for establishing targets in the energy sector. And as an action item CCDA was to conduct one-on-one consultation with relevant stakeholder on the zero draft on the enhanced NDC.