First national adaption plan for climate change: Republic of South Sudan

This document, South Sudan’s first NAP for climate change, is a landmark achievement in the country’s response to climate change. The first NAP represents an important milestone in establishing a coordinated approach to building adaptive capacity and resilience to better manage the challenges the country faces, including changing environmental conditions associated with climate change and global warming. The first NAP also follows guidelines introduced by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2019.

The vision of the NAP is to mainstream adaptation planning within South Sudan’s development planning across different government line ministries and climate resilient communities. This will ensure climate-centric development for long term resilience and interruption of the poverty cycle. The mandate of the NAP is to build leadership and ensure stakeholder participation to fulfill South Sudan’s commitment to the UNFCCC and to operationalize climate change adaptation at all levels. The NAP will play a number of key roles for South Sudan, including the following:

• Provide a roadmap of the steps needed to mainstream climate change adaptation into planning and budgeting at national, state and local levels.
• Identify actions that are needed to create enabling conditions for scaled up access to international climate finance from both public and private sources.
• Provide a baseline and starting point for climate change adaptation in South Sudan by consolidating all relevant information on the physical processes and impacts of climate change to establish a common understanding for all stakeholders.
• Provide a common and coherent articulation of adaptation priorities to guide and coordinate all stakeholders, including government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development partners, civil society organizations and the private sector, along the same pathway to a resilient and climate-adapted South Sudan. This includes providing a framework for determining and fulfilling South Sudan’s international commitments with respect to climate change adaptation.