NAMAs state of play

NAMA development has increased significantly in the past years, with 30% more NAMAs in development since December 2014. According to the NAMA Database by Ecofys,[i] which tracks NAMA development worldwide, up to October 2015 there were 162 NAMAs at different stages across 51 countries.

NAMAs are preferably implemented as wide sector policies and programmes with long term objectives. According to the Ecofys, more than half (57%) of all NAMA activities are carried out as part of national policies and strategies, and about a fourth (26%) as projects.

Regionally, most NAMAs are being developed in Latin America and Africa, which both account for about a third. Less than one tenth of NAMAs in development are located in Europe.

Only 13 out of 162 NAMAs are currently implementation phase. These can be found in Latin America (6), in Asia (6) and Africa (1). The remaining NAMAs are still under development. This is largely due to slow pace of finance, scarce capacity and technology available to move NAMAs forward from the development to the implementation phase.

The prevailing sector for NAMA development is energy, which accounts for close to half (43%) of all NAMA development and includes a range of policies and projects largely supporting renewable energy technology (e.g. wind, solar, thermal power, geothermal power, hydro, biomass, natural gas, etc).

This is followed by transport, waste and building sector. There are several NAMAs that address more than just one sector and at the same time target for example agriculture and waste (e.g. generation of bio-energy and GHG mitigation though organic-waste utilization in Pakistan).

[i] NAMA Database, http://www.nama-database.org/

By Urška Trunk, Policy Researcher at Carbon Market Watch

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