INTRODUCTION
Local Governments and Climate Change (LGCC) is a project implemented by NCDD Secretariat with technical assistance from UNCDF. LGCC is designed and implemented within the framework of the “Local Climate Adaptive Living” (LoCAL) programme being piloted by the Asia Pacific Regional Centre of UNCDF. As such, Cambodia becomes one of the first countries to pilot the LoCAL approach, together with Bhutan. Further pilots are in design phase in Laos, Bangladesh, Nepal and in the Solomon Islands and initial discussions on extending the program to the Africa region are under way.
PURPOSE OF PROJECT
The purpose of Local Governments and Climate Change (LGCC) project is to demonstrate the role of local governments in fostering climate change resilience and to identify practical ways to mainstream climate change resilience into sub-national planning and finance systems. An important focus is thus on how to strengthen institutions and systems at both national and sub-national levels. The entry points are provided by the recently introduced sub-national planning and sub-national finance systems.
OBJECTIVE
The Objective of LGCCII would be the same as LGCCI: “To demonstrate the role of Local Governments in fostering climate change resilience and to identify practical ways to mainstream Climate Change Resilience into Sub-National planning and finance systems.” LGCCII will build upon the achievements of LGCCI in the following ways:
1. The longer timescale will allow better integration of climate change resilience activities with the sub-national investment programmes and in particular will allow the concept of performance-based grants to be more thoroughly tested;
2. The geographic expansion will allow methods developed and lessons learned in LGCCI to be applied and will allow testing of the climate change resilience planning in more varied geographic, ecological and socio-economic settings; and
3. With the introduction from 2013 of the budgets and State Treasury accounts for the Districts and Municipalities under the Sub-National Finance Law on Sub-National Finance and Asset Management 2011, the PBCR grants will be more completely integrated with the sub-national public expenditure management systems than was possible in LGCCI. As explained below, this opens possibilities to innovate and test financial management procedures with potential significance for areas other than climate change adaptation.