FCMC supports LULUCF workshop in Guatemala
FCMC's institutional assessment and sector analysis for low-emissions development strategies (LEDS) in Guatemala identified areas for the GoG to improve its GHG reporting, including issues of documentation, completeness, and familiarity with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) guidance and principles for such accounting. Accordingly, the intent of the workshop was to familiarize the audience with the IPCC's good practice guidance for LULUCF GHG inventories as they apply to the forestry sector, and to introduce some of the updates to the 2006 guidance on GHG inventories as they compare to the 1996 guidance on the same subject.
FCMC engaged Walter Oyhantçabal, an independent contractor to FCMC, and Dr. Benjamin Caldwell, of Tetra Tech, to lead the two-day training. Both trainers had at least 15 years of experience working in GHG inventories and land use management. World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Guatemala provided logistical support. The target audience for the workshop was representatives of ministries and universities responsible or involved in drafting the countries’ report to the UNFCCC. A secondary audience was civil society organizations and representatives of the industries from the principal sectors causing GHG fluxes, and civil society organizations that are stakeholders in the process. The workshop was successful in this regard, in that there were representatives from each of the target audiences and the government ministries targeted were most heavily represented (Figure 1). There were 54 participants the first day and 33 the second day. Participants were almost evenly divided between men and women, and most had some higher education.
The trainers focused on the principles of GHG accounting in the latest guidance from the IPCC, and on practical application of that guidance to the land-use land cover change sector in Guatemala. Two reports, Understanding Land Use in the UNFCCC and Land Use in a Future Climate Agreement, which were produced with contributions from FCMC, were used as references in the workshop. Training took the form of lectures on the theory and exercises to cement the information communicated in the lectures, giving the participants the necessary foundation in the subject to continue learning independently thereafter. The workshop was evaluated positively by participants. Most of the participants expressed a desire to have more extensive training and capacity building in this area, particularly in technical capacity-building around remote sensing, forest inventory analysis, and geographic information systems. Many also expressed the desire to continue with more exercises.
