Policy Brief Issue No. 1 - Open NAPs - UNFCCC

Developing countries have been undertaking the process to formulate and implement National Adaptation Plans since 2011, scaling up their previous and other ongoing work on adaptation. Two issues led to this initiative on Open NAPs. Firstly, a number of operational questions arose in the early years by countries embarking on the process to formulate and implement national adaptation plans. This motivated the LDC Expert Group (LEG) to try out typical processes by putting the technical guidelines for the formulation and implementation of NAPs into practice with a few real country situations. Secondly, the LDCs continue to struggle and face severe capacity gaps in formulating their NAPs, given limited technical expertise available to them to cover the broad set of issues necessary in developing quality NAPs. This is evidenced by the small number of LDCs that have completed a NAP, compared to other developing countries. The LEG has developed the Open NAP as an initiative to work directly with country teams in formulating their NAPs, by mobilizing and engaging a wide-range of organizations and experts (“crowd-sourcing”), in addition to exploring innovative solutions to some common problems faced in formulating adaptation plans. The SBI highlighted the potential to make the Open NAPs even more useful to countries (SBI 49, under the LDC Matters item, December 2018).