Development of a toolkit to support the assessment of transformational change potential of climate policies and actions - CFP-11875-2021-06

Background:

The Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT) aims to help countries better assess the impacts of their climate policies and actions, and fulfil their transparency commitments. It does this by increasing the overall transparency capacities of countries, including the capacity to assess the contribution of climate policies and actions on countries’ development objectives, and providing appropriate methodological information and tools to support evidence-based policy-making. ICAT’s innovative approach is to integrate these two aspects.

The concept of Transformational Change (TC) has gained traction among climate change and sustainable development decision makers and practitioners, due to the radical changes required to meet the global goals for climate and sustainable development. In order to reach the aim of the Paris Agreement to limit the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C, preferably 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels, and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), societies must undergo fundamental, systemic shifts away from carbon intensive and unsustainable models of development. It is thus crucial that policies are developed to tackle GHG emissions, for instance, by avoiding further investments in fossil fuel infrastructure, promoting clean technologies, and enhancing sinks of GHGs, including forests.

From this context, a significant need has emerged to assess the transformational impacts of policies and actions, and understand whether they can catalyse a sustained paradigm shift in economic, political, social and technical systems. Methodologies such as the ICAT Transformational Change Methodology (https://climateactiontransparency.org/icat-toolbox/policy-assessment-guides/transformational-change/) have been developed to meet part of this need, by providing a definition of TC for GHG mitigation, and a detailed approach to assessing the transformational impacts of policies and actions towards targets, such as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and SDGs. The methodology has been met with interest by governments, financial institutions and programmes as a basis for assessing the expected or achieved transformational impact of policies and actions. However, there is still a lot of potential to be gained from broadening the definition and  facilitating its application through tools that allow it to be applied in many other relevant contexts.

ICAT is seeking a grantee(s) to develop a series of specialised, multi-purpose transformational change assessment and reporting tools and approaches, based on the ICAT Transformational Change Methodology. The tools and approaches will expand and further develop the existing ICAT TC definition and facilitate application of the methodology for several purposes, specialised to different contexts and users, and targeted to different needs.

Scope of Work

- Expansion of the definition of TC to include adaptation policies and actions.

- Development of an approach that enables comparison and aggregated assessment of the transformational impacts from a portfolio of policies and actions towards national or global goals.

- Development of a targeted definition of TC for carbon market/Article 6 purposes along with a TC tool for transformative impact assessment and design of transformative programmes.

- Development of a tool for assessment of investments by a fund and/or by companies, which want to demonstrate transformative impacts in line with the Paris Agreement, specific NDCs and/or the SDGs. Adapt the ICAT TC definition to be applied to investment portfolios.

Entities interested in submitting proposals in response to this CFP are hereby invited to prepare proposals in accordance with the requirements and procedure set out in this CFP by 31 May 2021, 17:00 CEST.

Returnable forms (Annex A, Annex B and Annex E attached) are to be submitted to icat@unops.org by the deadline indicated above.