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Policy gap analysis
mainstreamed in more detail into sectoral policy
documents. At this stage, however, there is a still a
lack of coordination of climate actions and priorities
within existing policy documents.
National policy papers should specifically address
mountain region adaptation to climate change,
especially in the context of improving ecosystem
resilience. Each of the relevant sectoral policy
documents should include corresponding actions
regarding climate change; either concrete ones, based
on existing assessments, or ones focused on finding
existing gaps in climate vulnerability assessments.
However, despite progress made by the countries
on mainstreaming climate change into policy
documents – a number of issues persist, as presented
in the previous chapters, which prevent full-scale
action in this direction:
• As explained in Chapter: Technology gap analysis,
vulnerability assessments are still fragmented;
• To include adaptation measures in policy
documents
government
agencies
should
have a clear justification of their importance,
as with mainstreaming climate change into
policy documents, they will facilitate imposing
responsibility on relevant agencies for their
implementation and allocation of financial
resources from national budgets. Otherwise
actions will either be too general or, as in case of
the INDC or Georgia’s Nationally Appropriate
Mitigation Actions (NAMA), commitments will
be made with caveats;
• Low-level of awareness about the issues among
government and local authorities and the general
public is preventing full climate action deployment
in all three countries;
• Insufficient institutional memory within relevant
agencies often leads to poor action planning and
implementation;
• And finally, a lack of knowledge of different
innovative financial mechanisms, and an inability
to sufficiently leverage existing financial resources
without substantially increasing expenditures,
also hampers the mainstreaming of climate change
actions into sectoral strategies.
All the countries of the South Caucasus made a
commitment to develop separate policy documents
on climate change adaptation, either internationally
or nationally. Such commitments derive not only
from international obligations, but also from certain
vulnerability studies conducted so far in the region.
One integrated national strategy on adaptation to
climate change (agreed among different government
agencies and stakeholders and constructed on the
basis of reliable studies), may help countries to
‘gather’ and incorporate all relevant actions into one
policy document; while its provisions can be further
Rural landscape, Azerbaijan