The Union of Comoros is a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) severely affected by the adverse impacts of climate change. The revised NDC indicates that Comoros is committed to becoming a carbon sink by 2030 by reducing its emissions by 84% and achieving its sustainable development and adaptation goals.1 However, several gaps are preventing the country from achieving its voluntary pledge and increasing its level of ambition. One of the main challenges is its low institutional capacity to generate scientific climate data and information to assess climate change impacts and use this data and information to develop strong climate change projects for financing from GCF and other financing partners in order to meet targets set in the country’s GCF Country Programme, NDC and NAP. (Refer to the problem statement, challenges, gaps and barriers below). In addition, critical climate data and insights from climate modeling is needed to inform national strategy planning and sustainable infrastructure development.

The Union of Comoros needs to develop a robust decision-making process based on the most updated scientific and climate-informed data, considering its vulnerability and the best measures to strengthen its resilience and the Union’s GHG emissions reduction goals and options identified in the revised NDC and NAP.

The overall objective of the readiness request is to support Comoros in building the capacity for accessing, analyzing and integrating climate information into sector decision making and leveraging insights from the climate data for developing and executing high-quality climate change projects. Finally the request will seek to develop the countries capacity for implementing effective national climate change programming and development agenda that leverages the most updated scientific climate data.

The Union of Comoros is thus submitting this readiness request to strengthen its key stakeholders’ capacity to generate, store and use scientific climate data and information to inform concept note development that contributes to the country’s adaptation and mitigation priorities and goals.

This will be achieved through an effective coordination mechanism that will ensure that relevant information is stored, accessed, and disseminated across all government levels and further utilized to inform climate change-related decisions and sustainable investment planning and development processes. The availability of tools and methodologies for integrating scientific climate information into climate change planning will further enable the development of long-term and coherent strategies in key sectors. Lastly, the proposed Readiness proposal will assist Comoros in identifying and analyzing available science and information required to elaborate and implement climate change strategies and proprieties and ensure a comprehensive needs assessment across selected sectors.