Forests Ministry holds workshop to advance climate transparency, carbon financing

LALITPUR: The Ministry of Agriculture, Forests and Environment (MoAFE), in partnership with WWF Nepal and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), held a national workshop on Friday to advance Nepal’s climate transparency systems and explore international carbon financing options.

The high-level technical meeting held in Lalitpur reviewed implementation plans for Nepal’s newly drafted Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC 3.0) brochure, which sets out the country’s mitigation and adaptation roadmap through 2035. Officials and experts discussed aligning domestic reporting and market mechanisms with international requirements.

MoAFE Joint Secretary Nabraj Pudasaini opened the session with a baseline assessment of ecological data and historical forest coverage from 1978 to 2024. He said community-based management models govern about 40% of Nepal’s forest areas and highlighted the legal and operational structure of community forestry. Pudasaini also noted that Nepal ranks 10th in Asia and 25th globally for wildlife biodiversity, supported by 20 protected areas, and placed these figures alongside national demographic data of 30 million people across 126 districts and diverse indigenous groups.

Pudasaini reviewed the evolution of state responses under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and outlined current emission reduction programmes across provinces, associated trade arrangements, and nationally set targets.

In a second session, Rajan Thapa, National Project Manager for the Capacity-Building Initiative for Transparency (CBIT) under WWF and MoAFE, demonstrated a government-verified digital platform designed to monitor, track and report national greenhouse gas emissions. The portal incorporates finalised datasets from the previous fiscal year’s national report and addresses changing global climate finance requirements, accountability thresholds and obligations under the Paris Agreement.

Climate and carbon financing expert Dr Prem Kumar Pokhrel led the final session on technical and regulatory mechanisms for engaging international carbon markets. He compared carbon taxes and emissions trading systems, assessed direct carbon pricing against fossil fuel subsidies, and outlined the life cycle of Clean Development Mechanism projects, covering pre- and post-implementation phases and multiple asset classes including carbon, biodiversity, plastic and W+ credits.

Pokhrel set out the main elements of Nepal’s carbon trading rules, which include a two-stage project approval process, defined institutional governance protocols and fixed fee-and-benefit-sharing arrangements. He identified three priority sectors for national carbon project development: renewable energy infrastructure, industrial and domestic energy efficiency, and sustainable land use and forestry management. He said domestic developers face significant hurdles, such as complex baseline methodologies, policy and regulatory gaps, uncertain upfront capital, and limited access to competitive global markets.

The workshop concluded with a strategic plan to diversify carbon transactions and immediate implementation steps tied to the NDC 3.0 financing strategy. The strategy totals $73.74 billion, sets targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17.12% by 2030 and 26.79% by 2035, and notes that 85.32% of the required funding is expected from international sources. Of the total, $65.5 billion is earmarked for energy infrastructure, with the remainder allocated to agriculture, forestry, waste management and inclusive adaptation initiatives.