Welcome to Bridgetown, Barbados and welcome to the second annual meeting of the Caribbean Cooperative MRV Hub.

The purpose of the Hub, as you are familiar, is to enable Caribbean countries to cooperate on technical challenges underlying climate change mitigation and to assist them in enhancing their understanding on MRV, enhanced transparency framework and monitoring and tracking of climate actions and Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs.

It is a great honor for UNDP to be able to support the MRV Hub as well as the realization of this event during the next two days, this being an opportunity to share the stories of your experiences in collecting and managing climate-related data, regarding what has been successful and innovative, and which activities were found to be overly costly and inefficient.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

To guide our climate actions, it is key to look at what the scientific data tell us and remember the message of the 2018 Special Report on global warming of 1.5ºC by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The key messages from the report are unavoidable

• Limiting the temperature rise to 1.5ºC is feasible only if carbon emissions are reduced by half by 2030 (only 10 years left) and if they can be reduced to “net zero” in 2050.

• To achieve such a radical reduction in emissions, it will be necessary to promote significant transformations of global energy and transportation systems, and to increase our efforts to protect and restore natural ecosystems.

Impressively, all countries in the region have ratified the Paris agreement and the commitment to achieve its objectives as well as to perform the necessary actions for its implementation.

However, the NDCs, which articulate national climate change efforts in the context of the Paris Agreement and the development priorities of the countries, are not yet sufficient to achieve this long-term global objective. The future NDCs to be presented this year and every five years thereafter, must constantly increase ambition and bring countries closer to sustainable development and low emissions.

In order to increase ambition, however, it is essential that each country has the tools to monitor the progress of its climate actions, understand their impact on national emissions and thus be able to continuously re-evaluate NDC implementation, and if necessary, make updates in their own NDC. All this cannot be done without the existence of solid, reliable climate inventories developed with the 2006 IPCC guidelines.

In fact, it is worth emphasizing a fundamental element of the Paris Agreement, mentioned in Article 13, which establishes the enhanced transparency framework with the objective of “giving a clear vision of the measures taken to address climate change in light of the objective of the Convention”.

This means that countries must provide clarity and easily monitor progress of the actions carried out to meet the climate commitments, in order to know at the global level if we are moving towards the objective of limiting the global temperature below 2°C and critically for SIDS, below 1.5°C.

Therefore, it is necessary to work on strengthening domestic mechanisms for measurement, reporting and verification, and to ensure these systems have ownership and support from a wide range of stakeholders in the public and productive sectors of each country.

In this regard, I want to highlight the importance that these mechanisms and plans are aligned with the Gender Action Plan, approved at COP 23 and COP 25, which promotes the incorporation of the gender perspective in climate policy and actions. Within this frame, among other things, all countries are encouraged to formally nominate to UNFCCC a national focal point on gender for strategic engagement with the climate process, which is important to increase the voice of women and vulnerable groups in the national and international climate dialogue.

From UNDP, we are extending our direct technical and financial support to the NDCs, as UNDP has committed to support 100 countries to deliver enhanced NDCs in 2020 to scale up ambition toward the climate targets. This is our Climate Promise, which includes 6 countries in the Caribbean. to enhanced transparency and to areas related to our programming under the Green Climate Fund, Global Environment Facility, including CBIT, Adaptation Fund, UN-REDD and other multilateral and bilateral sources.

We are working closely with our partners to ensure that each country has the necessary support to achieve its climate and sustainable development goals.

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Finally, trusting that these two days will be a valuable opportunity to exchange our ideas and experiences at the regional level, in an open and constructive way, I wish you all my best successes.