Photo credit: UNDP El Salvador
San Salvador, January 6, 2022. Under the leadership of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN), and with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), El Salvador presented the update of its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The country renews its national commitment to the landmark Paris Agreement, in which leaders from around the world agreed, in 2015, to strengthen climate action to keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit to a safer 1.5 degrees.
The updated NDC presents climate change adaptation measures for the Agriculture, Hydroelectric Power Generation, Infrastructure, Health, Sanitation, Solid Waste and Transportation sectors, and establishes priorities to promote adaptation in the Biodiversity and Ecosystems, Cities, and Water Resources sectors. For example, the new NDC includes actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the Energy sector; a cumulative emissions reduction target, and activities to increase carbon sinks and reservoirs in the agricultural landscape of the Agriculture, Forestry and Land-Use Change sector if large-scale financing is obtained from international and national sources with the participation of the private sector.
The Minister of Environment, Fernando López, explained that the country's commitment includes measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve resilience and adaptation capacity. Furthermore, he pointed out that “El Salvador aims to reshape institutional regulations to improve the capacity to address climate change and its negative effects, in addition to establishing the required means of implementation in terms of financing, technology development and transfer, training and capacity building at the individual and institutional level for climate action.”
“The NDC represents a strategic action agenda that will help the country move towards the Sustainable Development Goals. We thank UNDP for its technical support in this process,” the Minister emphasized.
To achieve the proposed goals and measures, El Salvador pays special attention to strengthening the arrangements in regard to public finances, implementation mechanisms and instruments, monitoring and results verification; as well as the preparation and execution of implementation plans, and the development of an intersectoral and multilevel articulation approach, which integrates the contribution of national technical and scientific, financial and public policy resources, with the support of the international community.
“We face a decisive moment to take individual and collective actions to face the climate emergency. We congratulate El Salvador for increasing its ambition and its climate action, and we reiterate our support and assistance to implement such commitment,” emphasized the UNDP representative in El Salvador, Georgiana Braga-Orillard.
As part of its Climate Promise action, UNDP is supporting 120 countries in the world to achieve their commitments made under the Paris Agreement. In the region, UNDP supports 25 countries, some of which have already submitted their updated NDCs, including Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Honduras, Jamaica, Peru, and Suriname.
In the country, UNDP has provided technical assistance and facilitated a multi-stakeholder participatory process, focused on improving knowledge about the global and national climate agenda. This process included more than 27 entities that actively participated in establishing this new climate policy and action instrument. These actions took place under the NDC Compliance Agenda project, implemented by MARN and the Ministry of Finance, with the support of UNDP and the Governments of Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
El Salvador's updated NDC document can be downloaded here.
You can read the press release in Spanish here.
Media contact: Ixchel Pérez: Ixchel.perez@undp.org, UNDP El Salvador
