Technology Needs Assessment (phase IV)

UNEP and UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre, with financing from the Global Environment Facility, are implementing a fourth phase of Technology Needs Assessments (TNAs). The fourth phase of the project supports seventeen Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in carrying out new or improved TNAs, from 2020 to 2023.

Since 2009, a hundred developing countries have joined the project: twenty-four countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region, thirty-seven in the African region, and thirty-nine in the Asia-Pacific region.

The objective of the TNA project is to support countries in assessing and articulating their technology needs for both climate change adaptation and mitigation. TNAs represent a unique opportunity for countries to track their needs for new equipment, techniques, services, capacities and skills necessary to mitigate and adapt to climate change and provide information about the potential, ability and scale of climate technologies at the country-level.

In particular, the TNAs lead to the development of national Technology Action Plans (TAPs) that prioritize technologies, recommend enabling frameworks for the diffusion of these technologies and facilitate identification of technology transfer projects and their links to relevant financing sources. The TAPs systematically address practical actions necessary to reduce or remove policy, finance and technology related barriers.

For the implementation of the project, UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre works with regional centres in each of the regions (Africa, Asia-Pacific and the Caribbean) to both support countries and create a greater awareness about technology needs at the regional level. The TNA Project is also implemented in close collaboration with the UNFCCC Technology Mechanism, being the Technology Executive Committee and the Climate Technology Centre and Network.

TNAs play a unique role in the formulation and implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions. Countries participating in the TNA project can therefore pursue both the targets they agreed under the Paris Agreement and their national Sustainable Development Goals.