By Audrey Raymonda John

EPA staff and representatives from different sectors within the government cycles have yesterday organized a one day national validation workshop on Sierra Leone’s First Biennial Update Report (BUR) to the United Nations Framework Connection on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The Environment Protection Agency Sierra Leone (EPA)’s staff were at a validation workshop held at the Atlantic hotel, Lumley in Freetown.

Giving the welcome address, Director and Technical head for EPA, Sheku Mark Kanneh, said the engagement was about validating a document that they have been working on which is a report that anchors on the national communications to the UNFCCC.

The report is produced every two years to indicate their commitments on how they are taking climate action forward.

He added that the report also shows how they were able to communicate those actions they have taken by reducing greenhouse gas, to ensure they give preference to the country on climate change and what they are doing to enhancing a civil information on climate change in the country, with efforts on implementing risk reduction strategies.

He said the Biennial Update Report is one commitment that has shown their responsive actions they have been taking to reducing their footprints that are contributing to climate change, nothing that it’s a continuation of the work done under the national communications which is submitted to the UNFCCC.

Director Kanneh said the BUR is a crucial document that highlights their national efforts and progress they have done in addressing climate change threats in order to fulfilling their commitments under the convention.

He continued that during the validation process they target different sectors including agriculture and forestry and other land users like waste management within the energy and transport sectors that are key contributors to climate change effects.

He said the report outlines national circumstance in terms of climate change which they have been able to talk about  to find an institutional arrangement and mechanisms for taking up climate actions thereby seeking to  identifying the greenhouse gas sources among others.

He ended that during the validation workshop they outlined the mitigation measures and actions, and mechanisms for monitoring reporting and verifications procedures.

“I want to encourage everyone to take action by protecting our environment because during the presentation we talk about the different factors that affect our country through climate change, so we need to take action and those actions required a multi-stakeholders engagements as relevant sectors within the country need to come together to take climate action that will utilize the information provided in the report,” he said.

He added that they’ve realized that data availability was a challenge in putting the report together; he therefore encouraged key stakeholders to helping them provide data for the next BUR report as that sets the baseline to help them provide justification on whatever strike or action that they may want to take to solve the country’s climate challenges.

While giving overview of the BUR, National Consultant for the BUR, Alpha Bockarie, said the BUR is the country’s audit of what was presented in the 4th national communication strategy as usually countries are requested to give update on their sources of greenhouse gas ambitions and how they hope to address them.

He continued that from the UNFCCC agreement, they wanted to track progress made from what other countries have entered in their national communication,.

He said one big challenge they faced while they were putting the report together was lack of finance as the resources given to them were not enough, giving the target on what they have to track down, adding that they also face challenge with data collection as most MDAs do not have the reboots method of data collection and that the most important data they needed to verify were not available.

He further said the overall challenge was due to the time short as they started the program two years ago but during the Covid-19, he said, there was a delay in even getting access to data as they would have started putting the report together in 2019, but they did not start until 2021 which delayed their work.

He noted that based on their findings Sierra Leone has taken a lot of climate actions and that are why he had commended the government for setting up the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, meaning that government has shown commitment to march their promises with actions.

He said they have noticed that every MDAs now has Environment Protection Office which is a very good step toward the global fight on climate change.

He also stated that the ministry of environment with other partners like EPA has committed to plant above 500 million trees across the country, and they have nearly planted 3 million trees.

And so when they looked at those actions of government, they were able to track that in the report.