Background
Asia-Pacific is on the front lines of the climate crisis. The region faces increasingly severe impacts from rising sea levels, extreme weather events and biodiversity loss, while also hosting some of the fastest-growing economies and innovation hubs in the world. The latest round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) shifts the center of gravity from target-setting to implementation and delivering whole-of-economy and whole-of-society implementation cannot be solely delivered by the government.
The outcome of the first Global Stocktake recognizes the crucial role of all sectors of society, from national and subnational governments, private enterprises, financial institutions, and civil society, in advancing climate action. As countries work to implement their NDCs, they need an integrated, inclusive approach to ensure climate strategies are implementable, locally grounded, and finance-ready.
In practice, this means that the sectoral transitions embedded in climate plans depend on capabilities that often sit outside environment ministries, such as risk-tolerant capital, independent evidence and modeling, technical and measurement capacity, a skilled workforce, and sustained public engagement. Philanthropies, universities, research institutions, professional bodies, subnational authorities and community organizations already hold much of this capability. What is usually missing is a structured channel between them and the national climate implementation agenda.
The UNFCCC secretariat, including through its Regional Collaboration Centre for Asia and the Pacific (RCC Asia-Pacific) is scaling up engagement with these partners in Asia. As the convenor of the multilateral climate process, the custodian of the global climate treaties and a catalyst for climate action through capacity building, technology, data and partnerships, the UNFCCC is positioned to broker connections between national climate priorities and the actors able to help deliver them.
Objectives of the Meeting
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Introduce the UNFCCC and RCC Asia-Pacific partnership approach in Asia and set out concretely what partnership can look like for each type of actor in the room;
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Explore alignment between participants’ priorities including on energy transition, adaptation, nature-based solutions, loss and damage, youth and local communities;
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Test what makes cross-sector partnership work in practice such as instruments, timelines, risk appetite, attribution, and the limits of what each partner can commit;
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Showcase entry points including multi-year funding arrangements, co-designed initiatives, research and analytical partnerships, joint capacity-building, and visibility platforms (Asia ACT Forum, Climate Weeks, COP).
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Listen and learn from participants about their strategies, constraints and preferred modes of engagement.
The roundtable aims to focus on the following questions:
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How does each partner translate NDC targets into implementation?
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What are the main priorities your institution is currently focused on, and where do you see the strongest opportunities to contribute?
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Which forms of support are you best positioned to provide, such as finance, evidence and analysis, technical capacity, convening or implementation support; or a combination?
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What has made previous partnerships with multilateral bodies work or fail, in your experience?
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What could UNFCCC provide or do to make engagement easier and more useful for your institution?
Expected Outcomes
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An initial mapping of who is contributing to NDC implementation in the region, in terms of capital, evidence, capacity, convening and delivery.
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Strengthened relationships between UNFCCC and Asian philanthropic, academic and non-traditional actors.
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A follow-up at COP31 in Antalya (November 2026)