OECD ENVIRONET - Quick Wins for Climate & Development - the Climate & Clean Air Coalition (CCAC).

On Thursday, September 14th the OECD ENVIRONET in partnership with USAID and the CCAC held a virtual event on Quick Wins for Climate & Development - the Climate & Clean Air Coalition (CCAC).
This primer event, ahead of the main event at the ENVIRONET Annual Meeting on October 5, outlined the development benefits of reducing short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs), showcased the work of the CCAC to date with presentations from country partners, and identified how the development community can best engage in scaling up action to reduce SLCPs.
Key takeaways from this session included:
Reducing SLCPs this decade presents an opportunity to achieve local health, food security, and economic development co-benefits for millions of people around the globe while keeping 1.5 degrees of warming within reach. These reductions are important to those already suffering from the results of climate change, to prevent biodiversity loss, to provide additional time for adaptation, and to realize the associated health and agricultural benefits.
The amount of funding going into SLCP reductions including for methane is lagging way behind, in terms of the mitigation potential, the possibilities to build resilience, and the success of global political commitments under the Global methane Pledge (GMP) now joined by more than 150 countries. There is also an important discrepancy between the enormous impacts of air pollution, and the small amounts of development financing being dedicated to tackling it.
Active partnership between ODA-eligible countries and development agencies is critical to scaling up emissions reduction efforts and advancing SLCP-related Sustainable Development Goals.
Support provided by the CCAC to ODA-eligible countries including the Maldives, Mexico, Nigeria, Vietnam (all of whom presented at the event) has resulted in policies and regulations as well as capacity building support to reduce SLCP emissions in key sectors. This work has laid the foundation to bring SLCP solutions to scale with additional implementation support required.
Development agencies including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC) have made strong commitments to SLCP reductions for climate and air quality benefits, both through the CCAC and in their own development portfolios. This is a successful model which has resulted in additional co-benefits to their own existing projects, and which has spurred new bilateral development partnerships including through Article 6 arrangements.
USAID and SDC invite participants to integrate SLCPs into their own development portfolios, country programs, and lending operations, as well as to join the CCAC while encouraging other multilateral institutions to act on climate & clean air.