Data Capacities and Access to Finance Key for ASEAN Climate Action

18 March 2022 -

The “Building Climate Change Data Management Capacities and Enhancing Access to Climate Finance” Forum was the first of a series of discussions from the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) Research and Development Platform Programme.

The forums aim to bring evidence-based research and insights to support ASEAN sectoral bodies in developing and implementing their activities. The programme is supported by the Government of Japan through the Japan-ASEAN Integration Fund (JAIF).

At the forum, Naoki Minamiguchi, the Director of JAIF Management Team (JMT), noted that the Research and Development Platforms Programme funded by JAIF aims to “assist ASEAN Member States to build climate change data management capacities and to enhance access to resources needed to address climate change adaption and mitigation.”

He also emphasised the importance of actionable sets of policy tools and innovative methodologies or guidelines to measure progress around specific climate change indicators.

At the end, the forum concluded the need to address three main challenges in both building data management capacity and access to climate financing: data uniformity, connectivity, and complexity.