15 October 2015: Cognizant that ambitious climate action will require efforts by a range of actors, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) have published a report focusing on three types of non-State stakeholders, namely sub-national governments, the private sector and financial institutions, and their involvement in climate action. The report, titled ‘Encouraging Increased Climate Action by Non-Party Stakeholders,’ examines how the 2015 climate agreement, expected to be adopted in Paris in December 2015, could encourage increased mitigation actions by non-party stakeholders and the financing of such actions.

The paper also: identifies barriers that can prevent the enhancement of such actions and assesses how the current process under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is addressing these barriers for the pre-2020 period; and explores options to establish or enhance links between the UNFCCC and non-party stakeholders in the 2015 agreement.

More specifically, the report includes a chapter that outlines barriers to mitigation action by non-party stakeholders, including national policy barriers and misalignments, mandate barriers, financial barriers, information and knowledge barriers, and capacity and skills barriers. Another chapter discusses the current UNFCCC process for enhancing pre-2020 mitigation and its impact on non-party stakeholders. A third chapter addresses how the 2015 agreement can help enhance mitigation actions by non-party stakeholders, including sub-national governments, the private sector and financial institutions. It also discusses supra-national groupings of sub-national governments and multi-governance initiatives, and proposes specific textual suggestions for the 2015 agreement.

The report was prepared in response to a request by the Climate Change Expert Group (CCXG), a forum for promoting dialogue between developed and developing countries on technical issues in international climate change negotiations. The CCXG secretariat is jointly provided by the OECD and the IEA. [Publication: Encouraging Increased Climate Action by Non-Party Stakeholders] [Climate Change Expert Group Website] [Climate Change Expert Group Flyer]