Developing a capacity building strategy for the design of the Colombian Emissions Trading Scheme

Over the course of the last years, the government of Colombia has been building a political and institutional framework to manage climate change. Both the Climate Change Law and the 2018–2022 National Development Plan aim to design the National Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading System (ETS), which is one of the measures that will contribute in the short term to the attainment of the goals declared in Colombia’s Nationally Determined Contribution.

To ensure that the design and pilot phases of the ETS can be carried out in a way that generates and shares information, builds trust, and creates buy-in from the various stakeholder groups that have a role to play in the public and private decision-making processes, the World Bank, with the financial support of the Partnership for Market Readiness, has launched a project to design a stakeholder engagement, capacity building, and communications strategy for the Colombian ETS design and pilot phases. Among others, this project evaluated previous communication processes on climate policy, identified the perception of Colombian citizens on climate change and carbon pricing, recommended the best internal and external communication channels to engage with different audiences and designed a capacity-building strategy.

adelphi mapped the existing capacities of stakeholders in the Colombian context to design and implement an ETS. By implementing a gap analysis which compared the existing situation to the desired level of knowledge and expertise on ETS implementation and design, adelphi identified the required capacity building needs and subsequently developed a capacity building strategy to address capacity gaps. With this project, adelphi contributed to overcoming some of the weaknesses identified in previous communication processes, as well as to strengthening the capacities of the public officers who actively engaged in the discussion and elaboration of the strategy.