Revision on Project Full pledged document and feasibility study for the Green Climate Fund (GCF)

Background

UNDP Sudan developed a country programme for 2013-16 with the aim to promote democratic governance, growth and sustainable development in consultation with the development partners. The programme focuses on creating an enabling environment for long term conflict prevention across all sectors of society and provides a basis for mainstreaming conflict and disaster risk sensitive programming. This goal pursues through various development activities including Environment, Energy and Climate Change.  The Environment, Energy and Climate Change portfolio focuses on strengthening capacities at local, regional and national level to manage and utilize natural resources in a sustainable way, to enhance resilience and adaptive capacity to long-term climate change including variability impacts and to reduce the associated risk of natural disasters.

Given the urgency and seriousness of climate change, the United Nations and Member States have established a new Green Climate Fund to make a significant contribution to the global efforts towards attaining the goals set by the international community to combat climate change. GCF is now the world’s largest multilateral fund for taking action on climate change, and will contribute to the achievement of the goals of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In the context of sustainable development, through a series of large scale country investments around the world, the Fund will promote a paradigm shift towards low-emission and climate-resilient development pathways, taking into account the needs of those developing countries particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. 

The Sudan’s proposed GCF project aims to build resilience to climate change risks among subsistence farmer communities throughout Sudan through a highly innovative set of activities that also show great promise for subsequent scale-up to other vulnerable communities, post-project. The key objective of the proposed project is to scale up a set of adaptation-focused measures that have already been tested via a pilot project. These measures affect to minimize and reverse the impact of weather and climate impacts on small-scale farmers and pastoralists, thereby reducing vulnerability of rural communities from increasing climatic variability and climate change. In general terms, these adaptation initiatives involve a hierarchy of activities that span risk minimization, risk absorption, and risk avoidance strategies in water and agricultural systems. Together, these activities comprise a set of specific measures that span three major intervention categories - improve knowledge systems, diversify household incomes, and transfer appropriate technologies – and intends to implement adaptation measures within four major regional clusters in 9 States of Sudan.

The project submitted to the Green Climate Fund Board and received technical comments. The project document needs to revise based on technical comments from the GCF and intend to resubmit by the mid of December 2017.

Duties and Responsibilities

The international consultant will be responsible for completing the following tasks over a period of 30 working days with the technical assistance of the Regional Technical Advisor (RTA) of Climate Change Adaptation. A national consultant will be recruited to support assisting in drafting the required documents and availing the required data as requested by the international consultant.

• Revise and submission of a Technical Feasibility Report: The focus area of the project will be agriculture and water sector as prioritized in the National Adaptation Programme and Action (NAPA) and the National Action Plan (NAP) for adaptation to climate change. The consultant should revise the technical feasibility report based on technical comments by the ITAP-GCF;
• Revision and Submission of a GCF Project Document: The consultant should further detail and prepare concrete response to the GCF based on technical comments by the ITAP-GCF.  The revised project document and technical reviewer sheet will be prepared as per the “template of the Green Climate Fund”. The revised project document should demonstrate how the revised project is fully aligned with UNDP and government strategic plans, policies and programmes; highlighting opportunities for synergies and coordination; and indicate risks, that might prevent the project objectives from being achieved, and propose measures that address these risks. The consultant should also revise the project’s Logical Results Framework and the project budget as well as suggesting the institutional arrangements and implementation frameworks. The consultant should also be able to demonstrate economic viability of the suggested interventions; financial analysis and any other issues that raised post to the review of the ITAT-GCF and Regional Climate Change Adaptation Advisor;
• Finalization of the revised GCF project document and the Technical Feasibility report: Incorporation of comments from UNDP, NDA and HCENR, and UNDP regional Office and Submission of the final report and technical feasibility report.

Competencies

Corporate Competencies

• Demonstrates integrity by modeling the UN’s values and ethical standards;
• Promotes the vision, mission, and strategic goals of UNDP;
• Displays cultural, gender, religion, race, nationality and age sensitivity and adaptability;
• Treats all people fairly without favoritism;
• Ability to work with a multi-cultural and diverse team.

Functional Competencies:

• Demonstrated experience in project design;
• Demonstrated experience in technical issues related to adaptation to climate change;
• Ability to analyze large amounts of complex and diversified data related to climate change adaptation in least developed countries;
• Demonstrated strong coordination and facilitation skills;
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to initiate discussions about climate change adaptation and reliance issues specifically in the water and agricultural sectors.

Required Skills and Experience

Education

• Master degree in environment, climate change, water management or related disciplines.

Experience

• Minimum 10 years of experience in climate change adaptation, water and agricultural strategic frameworks and issues.

Language

• English.