UN climate agency opens first Asia-Pacific hub

The United Nations’ climate agency opened its first Asia-Pacific regional hub to promote clean technology on Tuesday.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) launched the Regional Collaboration Centre (RCC) which is based in Bangkok, Thailand.

The RCC was opened in partnership with the non-profit Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Japan and will assist developing countries in the region to identify and develop clean development mechanism (CDM) projects to help limit the impacts of climate change.

The RCC will help to source the funding needed to implement CDM projects and Luca Brusa, a team leader at the UNFCCC, said: “It’s important for the region to have its own centre to make it better equipped in mitigating the impact of climate change.”

The CDMs will be in line with the nationally suitable mitigation measures and the centre is aiming to source funding for about 300 projects per year.

The RCC will have a particular focus on countries that have yet to implement CDM projects including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.

In a statement, UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres (pictured) said: “The agreement needs to trigger an ever deeper transition to a low carbon economy and, by the second half of the century, a climate neutral world. Scaled up finance, innovative technologies and creative market mechanisms that benefit people and the planet will be central to these aims.”

The CDM is one of the market-based mechanisms created under the Kyoto Protocol to support developing nations in implementing projects designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote green growth.

Projects including clean energy generation, reforestation initiatives and energy efficiency programmes, enable countries to earn certified emission reduction (CER) credits, each equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide.

CERs can then be traded and sold, and used by developed nations to meet their GHG emissions reduction targets.

According to the UN Environment Programme and Technical University of Denmark, there are currently about 7,000 CDM projects in the Asia-Pacific.

The Bangkok RCC is the fifth regional hub established by UNFCCC and it will work with other regional collaboration centres in Togo and Uganda in Africa, Colombia in Latin America and Grenada in the Caribbean.