Integrated Assessment for Article 6 (IAA6)

Carbon markets have the potential to facilitate more ambitious climate action through cost-savings and effective channelling of financial resources. However, countries are lacking the technical capacities to easily assess how Article 6 approaches can be used to achieve a broad set of goals. This includes aligning with climate and development priorities as well as avoiding any environmental and social harm.

To develop the required knowledge and capacity, the European Commission, Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG CLIMA) is funding the Integrated Assessment for Article Six (IAA6) Project. It will adopt a South-South approach to the iterative co-development of technical tools enabling evidence-based policy making and implementation of Article 6 carbon markets in Peru, Sri Lanka and Tanzania. Utilizing this toolbox, together with capacity development and stakeholder processes, the project supports countries in analysing and planning for domestic mitigation strategies with Article 6 cooperative approaches that align with the countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement.

The project is steered by a Project Coordination Committee (PCC) composed of representatives from the European Commission, UNEP, UNOPS, and UNEP-CCC. It is implemented by UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre (UNEP-CCC), jointly with selected implementation partners from the Global South.

The project aims to catalyse broader deployment of the tools and approaches regionally and globally. Specific project activities and impacts include:

1) Developing a toolbox for integrated assessment for the countries’ Article 6 strategies. This builds on Costa Rica’s open-source Climate Change Metric System (SINAMECC) and its Climate-Land-Energy-Water (CLEW) modelling platform, among other publicly available resources and draw on standardised data structures. The toolbox enables the analysis of mitigation costs and impacts for sustainable development, policies and project development, dynamic baselines, iterative stakeholder engagement as well as impact assessment aligned with MRV/transparency and transformational change approaches to a just sustainability transition.

2) Supporting three countries in developing country-driven approaches to tailor and apply selected tools in the toolbox. The project will first engage with pre-selected country partners to identify needs, gather contextual information and data, and define how to best structure the implementation process. Afterwards, toolbox components will be collaboratively refined to suit the country-specific requirements. This will help to continuously improve the tools and ensure their context-sensitivity. Specific outcomes from the implementation process may include the utilization of international open-source data to develop local climate action models and modelling capacities. Another example is the design of sophisticated processes for holistic climate policy co-creation.

3) Facilitating regional and global knowledge sharing, communication, and outreach. The project will publicly share tools and country activities, socialize lessons learned (at regional and global UNFCCC events), and conduct a needs assessment for a wider deployment.

The toolbox complements existing UNEP-CCC initiatives on capacity building and analysis for Article 6 implementation. This includes the analysis of carbon market developments (Pipelines for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Article 6), impact assessment tools for sustainable development (Sustainable Development Initiative for Article 6) and transformational change as part of the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT), as well as piloting of Article 6 activities, such as the Supporting Preparedness for Article 6 Cooperation (SPAR6C) project.

The final version of the toolbox, incorporating lessons learned from country applications, will be made available and will be linked here.

During COP28, IAA6 organized an event focusing on carbon market standards and capacity needs in countries along with representatives from Peru, Sri Lanka and Tanzania. Watch the recording here.  

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