SPA

25th Meeting of the Partnership on Transparency in the Paris Agreement (PATPA)

The 25th Partnership Meeting was held on December 4th 2019 during the COP 25 in Madrid. About 40 negotiators and practitioners from developing and developed countries as well as partner organisations exchanged their experiences and discussed about the actual negotiations status.

The participants received an update on the latest knowledge products and activities with a special focus on the Annual Partnership Retreat (APR) that took place in Lebanon in October 2019. The theme of APR was the transition from the old system to the new Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) and the representative of Lebanon Mary Awad brought some key insights of the retreat:

-The countries have different starting points and the steps of the transition differ when the starting point is taken into consideration;

-Another theme was digitization. The emergence of this topic across different regions is a strong message that moving to the ETF will require a wide range of tools related to technology; and
-Finally, all need to gear up their actions for submitting the BTR (Biennial Transparency Reports) in 2024. For developing countries, the development of a BUR (Biennial Update Reports) is the best practice to get prepared for the BTR as the old reporting system builds on the existing one.

Afterwards, Isabela Santos, staff of PATPA, provided updates on PATPA activities, by giving an outlook on the first half of 2020 in terms of planned regional workshops and missions under the Climate Helpdesk. She announced the nomination of PATPA focal point in the countries in the near future and the importance of continuity of the participants in the activities.

All three founding countries, South Africa, Republic of Korea and Germany, gave their inputs and outlined their visions for the PATPA. Maesela Kekana from South Africa opened the meeting and welcomed the participants. He highlighted the partnership on transparency as a key driver of peer-to-peer learning, political dialogue on enhanced transparency and for strengthening networks and trust between participants.

The representative of the Republic of Korea, Minyoung Kim, confirmed that PATPA is “a successful exchange platform among transparency negotiators”. She emphasized the importance of the collaboration with regional partners and strengthening the networks between countries in order to transfer more ownership to the regions. She announced that the Republic of Korea is going to host a regional workshop next year.

Nicole Wilke, Representative of Germany, closed the event by thanking all participants, bilateral donors and partner organizations for the fruitful collaboration. The three founders expressed the wish that PATPA should continue to provide capacity-building support in the different well-established formats on global, regional and country level. In order to leave no one behind, PATPA should continue to invest in enhancing national capacities in developing countries and facilitate peer-to-peer learning.