Your are invited to register for the e-course on The use of trade related measures in support of national climate plans, co-organized by UNCTAD, UN ECA, ISO, Curtin University, Global South Nexus, and scheduled from November 7 to December 16, 2025.

To register, kindly visit the home page of the course: https://unctad.org/meeting/e-learning-course-harnessing-trade-advance-national-climate-and-development-goals

Registration deadline: October 31, 2025

The course draws on our recently published guide on the inclusion of trade related measures in NDCs https://unctad.org/publication/trade-policies-advance-national-climate-plans

Stay connected for updates and additional resources.

Regards,

Task Force 2 (KM)

Dear OIBC-4 members, from the OIBC-4 Secretariat, Catherine Mwangi is inviting you to kindly find here the final versions of documents of our annual retreat that took place after the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development-11 (ARFSD), on April 12, 2025, at the Speke Resort, Munyonyo, Uganda.

Agenda for the RCP and OIBC- 4 Dialogue on COP 29 Outcomes, Carbon Markets and Energy Acess.pdf

Concept Note on RCP and OIBC-4 Dialogue on COP29 Outcomes, Catbon Markets and Energy Access.pdf

Concept note on retreat for OIBC-4 2025.pdf

DialogueAdvancing Environmental Sustainability COP 29 Outcomes Carbon Markets Energy Access and Climate Action in Africa.pdf

Draft OIBC Planning Retreat Agenda one-day 11042025.pdf

Outcomes_Pre-event dialogue on Carbon Markets_Energy Access_COP29.pdf

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Key Objective: To Prepare a Joint Work Plan and Resource Mobilization Strategy

Date: April 12, 2025

Venue: Speke resort & Conference Centre Munyonyo, Kampala, Uganda

Overview:

The planned retreat will provide a critical opportunity for OIBC-4 to strengthen its coordination, increase the number and commitment of participating agencies, develop a shared vision, and mobilize resources for impactful joint actions. By working collaboratively, OIBC-4 members and partners can make significant strides in addressing the complex challenges facing Africa and contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals across the continent.

Key Documents
Concept note on retreat for OIBC-4 2025 final.pdf
Final OIBC Planning Retreat Agenda one-day 03042025.pdf
Final Concept Note on RCP and OIBC-4 Dialogue on COP29 Outcomes Catbon Markets and Energy AccessF.pdf

Carbon markets are generally made up of the Compliance Market and the Voluntary Carbon market (VCM). The VCM - Individuals and companies voluntarily choose to purchase carbon credits that finance projects which avoid or sequester emissions, e.g. nature-based solutions, clean cookstoves, or renewable energies. Compliance market - Government regulations require certain industries to limit their carbon emissions through financial incentives – these can take the form of a tax or an emissions trading system (ETS e.g. the EU ETS), whereby companies can trade emissions credits to comply with these regulations. The third type to consider is International trading of carbon credits through Article 6 - Nations sign bilateral agreements under Article 6 of the Paris Climate Agreement to trade carbon credits (called ITMOs ), where the acquiring country can use the credits towards their climate targets (NDCs).

Carbon markets are crucial in the fight against climate change as they provide economic incentives for reducing emissions. By putting a price on carbon, these markets encourage individuals, businesses, and governments to invest in cleaner technologies and practices. Furthermore, carbon markets can unlock new avenues for green growth, thus helping Africa tap into investments in renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, restoration and conservation, in doing so, creating green jobs and combating energy poverty. Beyond these opportunities, carbon credits also present a scalable option for effective climate finance in Africa that will materially aid decarbonisation on the continent, a crucial task in this decade. They also mitigate the continent’s risk of ‘carbon lock-in,’ (high-emissions energy infrastructure built today that causes society to remain dependent on fossil fuels into the future).
With voluntary carbon credits valued at roughly $2 billion globally and potentially growing 5-50x by 2030, high-integrity carbon markets could provide significant benefits to African people and be a critical source of climate finance for the continent. However, although Africa possesses immense potential for nature-based solutions, it holds only a circa 2% of this potential transformed into carbon credits and African carbon markets still comprise only about 16% of the global credits market.

ACMI’s 2022 Roadmap Report highlighted that Africa has the potential to scale its carbon credit market 19-fold by 2030, supporting up to $6 billion of revenue and 30 million jobs. This will require all actors in African carbon markets to play a more prominent role. More broadly, beyond just Africa, for global carbon markets to unlock 5- to 50-fold growth over the next decade, governments and the private sector will need to: (1) ensure overall credit integrity in the compliance markets, the VCM and international trading schemes, (2) create favourable government regulation, and (3) set increasingly ambitious climate action targets.

Dear colleagues, this is a call for discussion. Please share your thoughts, experience, lessons learned, and related knowledge resources to enrich this discussion and support policy formulation and actions.

Prepared by Daniel James Fisher, under the guidance of Gabriel Labbate from UNEP Climate Change Division

I am reaching out to tap into the collective wisdom of our community as we work to foster sustainable development at the grassroots level. Our project is focused on addressing critical challenges such as clean water scarcity, the transition to renewable energy, and the improvement of agricultural practices.

While we've made strides in these areas, we recognize that ensuring the long-term success of our initiatives requires a multifaceted approach. We're particularly interested in learning how to:
*

I also check this: https://www.uneca.org/stories/pace-of-progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-is-insufficient-to-achieve-set-targetssnowflake

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Through promoting regional collaboration and resource mobilization; the Regional Comprehensive Partnership should to be essential in saving the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa. By offering local governments and organizations financial and technical help; the RCP may improve capacity building. Efforts aimed at reducing poverty; building up infrastructure; and inclusive economic growth should be given top priority.

Against this background, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the Centre d’Etudes Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII) jointly undertook analytical work to examine how industrial transformation and economic development led by the AfCFTA reform can be made consistent with Africa’s climate ambitions.

Key findings indicate that:

Implementing the AfCFTA Agreement and achieving Africa’s climate objectives are compatible: With climate policies implemented in addition to the AfCFTA Agreement Africa’s GHG emissions could decrease by around 25% with intra-African trade still increasing by about a-third, in 2045, and compared to a scenario without AfCFTA and climate action.

Continental coordination among African countries in terms of GHG emissions reduction is more efficient than an uncoordinated approach, including through existing, highly variable (cross-country), and often ambitious NDC targets.

Africa’s climate objectives can accelerate a transition to renewables.

Question:

What potential trade-offs do you see between trade and economic growth, on the one hand, and environmental objectives on the other hand, in the AfCFTA context?

However, despite these developments, one issue that has existed since the emergence of the scholarly and scientific literature is authorship. Authorship in a scientific publication is an indicator of significant intellectual contribution to scientific work. Regardless of the discipline, authorship is a currency in research, and it is important for research-related personnel to receive credit, take responsibility, and be accountable for their publications. Authorship is used to assess performance and thus influences hiring decisions, promotions, awards, scholarships, salaries, funding, and invitations to serve or participate in prestigious activities that are beneficial to career advancement. Thus, authorship is not just a list of names. It is a mechanism to establish recognition, credit, integrity, accountability, and responsibility in research and development. Therefore, it ought to be free from any form of misinterpretation, errors, wrongful inclusions, and exclusions.

United Nations Regulatory Framework on Authorship Management

The Administrative Instruction ST/AI/167 of 14 April 1966, bearing Attribution of authorship and related matters in United Nations publications and other papers, signal the beginning of regulatory frameworks on authorship management in the United Nations System. More recently, the Under-Secretary-General for Management, pursuant to section 4.2 of the Secretary-General’s bulletin ST/SGB/1997/1, and for the purposes of amending the provisions, procedures and policy on the attribution of authorship in United Nations documents, publications and other official papers, promulgated Administrative Instruction ST /AI/189/Add.6/Rev.5, bearing Regulations for the control and limitation of documentation: Attribution of authorship in United Nations documents, publications and other official papers, which replaced ST/AI/189/Add.6/Rev.4 of 12 February 1996 and ST/AI/189/Add.6/Rev.3 of 19 March 1990 on the same topic.

Based on the above framework, respective UN agencies have put in place an enabling environment for authorship management in their knowledge production and publication activities. This is the case with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), where, Information circular 043 of December 12, 2013 , provided the guidelines on Publications and Documentation. The objective was “to inform staff members of the basic tenets governing publishing at ECA, [and] ensuring that the Commission’s publications programme is cohesive and of the highest quality possible, delivered and marketed in a timely manner in formats that meet the demands of today’s and future ECA audience” (para. 1). Equally, to ground the reprofiling process of the ECA and to be further sharpened upon completion of the branding exercise of ECA as a premier policy think-Tank of the continent. It also takes into account the intention to establish an ECA Internal Publishing House of World-class caliber. And it confirms to the rules laid out in United Nations ST/AIS and amendments and guidelines on publishing in the United Nations as a set by the United Nations Publications Board” (Para. 2).

Despite the above common regulatory framework, over the years disjointed and diverse practices have been observed in authorship management within the Africa UNDS. Furthermore, within agencies, authorship management and related issues have been challenging, and have raised questions, including: Who should be attributed authorship? What benefits does authorship attribution bring to the author? What does authorship signal or mean to the broader community? How should issues and conflicts around authorship be handled?

Recognizing the importance of the unique experience, expertise, and knowledge that the UN system brings to the understanding and management of global issues; mindful of the need to implement ongoing reforms aiming at a more effective, coherent, coordinated, and better-performing United Nations at regional, country and agency levels; and based on the report of the High-level Panel on United Nations System-wide Coherence in the areas of development, humanitarian assistance and the environment addressed to the Secretary-General calling for United Nations agencies to exploit their competitive advantages to “Deliver as One”, the above questions have raised the need to advocate for a rethinking for a more harmonious and common authorship management practice within the Africa-UNDS.

Current Status versus International Recommendations on Authorship Management

To understand the above questions, without being exhaustive, it is important to look at an example of current authorship management practice within the Africa-UNDS and to make a quick summary of international recommendations related to this exercise.

Current Status of Authorship Management within the Africa-UNDS: Evidence from ECA

A review of existing documentation reveals that until now, and despite its substantial output, ECA has not adopted an editorial policy to guide on authorship and publication of its research output. Instead, it has, out of need and custom, relied on assorted administrative documents and institutional practices that have become established over time, and that does not provide clear answers to the above questions on authorship. Historically, the Commission did not include individual authors’ names in publications, a situation that does not give due recognition and credit to researchers. Furthermore, the corporate name of the Commission is not standardized and not included in all her publications, with variant names including ECA, UNECA, Economic Commission for Africa, etc. Apart from the above authorship issues, there is the need to standardize the publishing procedures (peer-reviewed, abstracting, and formatting) for its publications to be correctly indexed in international citation Database systems, widely and openly accessed, informatively exploited, and cited.

International Recommendations on Authorship Management

Amongst international recommendations on authorship management, the recommendation is one of the most respected. It defines an author of a scientific publication as a person who has:
• Contributed substantially to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; and
• Drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content; and made a final approval of the version to be published; and
• Agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Most international recommendations recommend the following five strategies for authorship management:
a) Adopt an editorial policy and encourage a culture of ethical authorship: researchers who are being unethical about authorship are simply following local customs and practice. Therefore, institutions need to adopt and rigorously implement an editorial policy that: (i) emphasis on best practices to avoid authorship problems from the outset and (ii) strategies for managing authorship issues once they have occurred.
(a) Initiate discussions about authorship expectations at the very beginning and as the research project evolves: Raise the subject right at the start and not at the end. Continue to discuss ideas about authorship as the project evolves, and especially if new contributors get involved.
(b) Define responsibility and contribution that gives right to authorship. Confirm in writing who will be doing what—and by when, and which contribution is entitled to authorship.
(c) Responsible inclusion in authorship. Publication is the core currency of science, and research teams have a responsibility to be inclusive of those that contribute to realizing a project.
(d) Consider contributions to be intellectual property. An individual scholar or researcher working on an idea, method, database, analysis, or writing is considered by scientific norms and copyright law to be generating a form of intellectual property (IP). Their research is protected by principles of academic freedom and they retain the right to be recognized as the generator of intellectual outputs.

Advocating for a Common Policy to Guide Practice

Best practice requires that all organizations whose activities include the production of scholarly and scientific outputs need to set out, more or less formally, a tacit or explicit editorial policy that will guide in the production of a standardized, consistent, and timely range of publications. Apart from authorship management, the core objectives of an editorial policy are to: (i.) provide a set of guidelines for quality assurance in the production of published material, (ii) design strategies for improve visibility, access and use of the product, and iii) provide tools to measure the impact and performance.

It is true that the administrative instructions of the United Nations Secretariat and other agency-specific documents provide the regulatory framework for authorship management, including guidelines on the publication of research outputs. However, the challenges observed at ECA suggest the need to avoid disjointed, incoherence, and dissonance approach in authorship management within the Africa-UNDS, and to encourage a common practice, greater rigour, guided by a more explicit and comprehensive tool in the form of an editorial policy, which is easy to appropriate and use system-wide.

Indeed, publications and other knowledge products are the main vehicles for transmitting the United Nation’s experience, thinking, and proposals to its Member States, academia, and civil society. As such, they must adhere to high standards in terms of authorship management, content relevance, quality of presentation and style, and timely response to events and the needs of the countries. One of the hallmarks of UN publications must be quality assurance. It is an asset for the organization and as such merits special attention. Quality concerns both processes and products. It involves all participants in the editorial chain, from the germination of ideas to the distribution and dissemination of the final product. The substantive side of quality in publications refers to relevance, timeliness, credibility, and reliability. The formal attributes of quality have to do with authorship management (proper recognition of intellectual contribution), formatting and presentation (length, style, functional design, abstracting, attractiveness), Peer-reviewing (critical in providing scientific value to the contents), referencing (adoption of a unique style for the presentation of bibliographic references). Both elements must be considered in a common editorial policy to guide uniform practice across the Africa-UNDS.

Towards a Common Authorship Management Practice

Recently, the question of authorship has been a source of open debates, which has at times overflowed research corridors and watered down the research efforts undertaken by the Africa UNDS to produce high-impact and world-class publications. This has equally played down and undermined the strategic role of the UN in experience and knowledge sharing in providing understanding and management of global issues. The aim of the ongoing reforms for a more result-driven United Nations and the call to deliver as one has exposed the imperative to rethink and repurpose UN publications as the main vehicles of its thoughts across the continent.

In response to the recommendations of the report of the Secretary General of the United Nations, entitled “Shifting the Management Paradigm in the United Nations: Implementing a new management architecture for improved effectiveness and strengthened accountability”, the creation of the Africa Regional Collaborative Platform (RCP) is an opportunity to bring together UN agencies working across the continent to reflect on the urgent need for a common policy to guide authorship management practice in their knowledge production activities, where the respect for intellectual property rights becomes inalienable to the author.

AWUNG Frankline, Ph.D.
Knowledge Management Officer - ECA,