Climate Discussion on National Adaptation Plan Formulation Process of Nepal held

Monday, 31^st August, 2020: With the objective to update multi stakeholders and to discuss their inputs for the NAP process of Nepal, Clean Energy Nepal organized this climate discussion on Nepal’s ongoing NAP process. Mr. Ajay Dixit, Advisor at Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET) Nepal, Ms. Srijana Shrestha, Under Secretary at Climate Change Management Division, Ministry of Forest and Environment (MoFE), Mr. Manjeet Dhakal, Executive Member at Clean Energy Nepal, Dr. Bimal Regmi, Senior Consultant at Oxford Policy Management, and Ms. Saraswoti Subba, President at National Land Right Forum (NLRF) joined the program as panelists. The program was moderated by Ms. Krity Shrestha, Executive Member of Clean Energy Nepal. Mr. Lalmani Wagle, Senior Program Officer at Clean Energy Nepal shared an overview presentation on NAP Formulation Process of Nepal. 

Starting with the context of the beginning of policy formulation in climate change, Mr. Dixit stressed the urgent need of identifying the attribution of disasters being observed and the need of localization of global climate negotiations. He further highlighted the need to contextualize policies based on the lesson learned from the past one and half decade. “We need to focus on redesigning infrastructures or retrofit so that we can deal in a range of variables. There can be damage but restoration has to be fostered without creating further vulnerabilities. For that, individuals, households, communities, business entities including state agencies should work together to build better capacity.” he concluded. 

Mr. Dhakal said that although we are currently struggling hard to combat COVID 19 pandemic which might be controlled after a couple of years, climate change is  the long term problem and we should urgently amplify our mitigation and adaptation efforts. Mr. Dhakal further highlighted the linkages and synergies between the NAP and NDC linking it with the recent research conducted from Climate Analytics. Ms. Shrestha, updated the participants about the recently approved Environment Protection Rule (EPR) which has clearly mentioned that GoN will continuously update its adaptation priorities every decade & ensure stakeholders engagement. She further shared that, even during the COVID 19 pandemic, the GoN is continuously working on the NAP process and in case of taking the opinion and inputs from stakeholders, virtual meetings are being conducted by the MoFE.  

Giving the examples of impacts of climate change in agriculture, Ms. Subba shared that ensuring engagement of landless people and smallholder farmers including the most vulnerable communities are prioritized in our policies but we are far behind this target which should be immediately addressed by engaging them in the NAP process. Dr. Regmi briefly shared about the ongoing Vulnerability & Risk Assessment (VRA) as a part of NAP process and highlighted the need of adaptation priority setting based on the socio-economic context while also considering the inputs from the stakeholders. 

The program was attended by more than 90 participants wherein they put forward their queries and concerns regarding the ongoing process and possible future scenarios of NAP in Nepal which were addressed by the panelists.