MRV & Transparency

Our approach to MRV and transparency

Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) is essential for integrating climate and other environmental dimensions into sectoral, national, and subnational decision making. Our approach is based on over 25 years of data gathering, analysis, quality assurance, reporting, and stakeholder engagement. Target setting and monitoring progress towards targets, identifying needs and gaps, aligning investment and support, and driving ambition needs good quality, dependable data on the impacts of human activities on the environment. Our MRV support services include a wide thematic scope across mitigation, adaptation, and support, and integrates analysis of wider impacts on sustainable development associated with action taking. Important thematic areas are outlined below. 

MRV-scope.pngAether’s approach to developing capacity for high value MRV and transparency has been well tested and proven. It focuses on structuring support and breaking down specific areas for development requiring different thematic or cross cutting skills. This approach enables the rapid identification of training and capacity building needs and provides a clear framework for sharing of knowledge and lessons learned. This enables an entity e.g. organisation, country, or region, to build sustainable, comprehensive, and valuable MRV systems. The approach is outlined below. 

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Aether's partnership approach

Capacity building, mentoring, and support is a central goal for our MRV systems projects. We aim to work in partnership with our customers to deliver high quality, sustained data flows, effective engagement with decision makers, and decision support tools. We recognise that different customers have different needs and provide outsourced services that are tailored to these needs. This includes expert data gathering, compilation, stakeholder engagement, reporting, and/or verification service. We cater for small to medium sized customer-defined projects on knowledge sharing, training, and mentoring with a focus on helping their own teams develop and grow. Throughout our work we put a strong emphasis on stakeholder engagement, identifying key individuals and organisations and helping our customers to engage closely and sustainably with them in the long term, and building value in the work they do. 

Aether's MRV portals

Aether’s MRV portals are bespoke, online, collaborative platform services designed to complement our consultancy, training, and mentoring services. Our customers are increasingly required to gather data on a regular basis from an array of different stakeholders and prepare a range of transparent reports, websites, briefings, and engagement activities. Aether’s MRV portals help with this task by providing a central place for data gathering, data structuring, archiving, and reporting solutions that can be accessed by a range of contributing stakeholders and used by focal points to collate information. Our MRV portals can support teams working on one or more thematic areas including GHG inventory and projections, analysis of risks and vulnerabilities, and gathering, enhancing, and reporting information on adaptation and mitigation actions and their support. Our customisable tool helps with keeping track of stakeholders, tasks, improvements, outputs, and reporting activities, for example, under Paris Agreement and its Enhanced Transparency Framework as well as other reporting frameworks. Aether’s portals are flexible online databases that can be provided using third party software services or designed and built from scratch to our well tested specification by our clients’ own IT team.

Our portals offer structured data collection, management, and output templates. During an MRV project data may be collected from a range of sources including surveys, reporting templates, model outputs, method descriptions, and stakeholder engagement. The portal offers a framework for collating and recording this data. We are continuously developing outputs that add value to the inputted data by enabling it to be used in multiple ways. We develop automated output tables that can be used in BURs, BTRs, NDCs, NCs, and other national reports. We also have expertise in providing a range of engagement tools including data visualisation, training and mentoring, and stakeholder consultation.

Case studies

Montenegro's Third Biennial Update Report (BUR)

Justin Goodwin was contracted as an international expert to support Montenegro with writing the Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) chapter for their third Biennial Update Report.

Capacity building in Liberia for GHG inventory compilation and MRV systems

Aether, in partnership with NEXUS International University (NIU) and the University of Liberia, provided capacity building training in GHG inventory compilation and MRV systems in Liberia.

Developing Saint Lucia’s GHG Inventory

Aether provided capacity building training to the national GHG inventory team of Saint Lucia. A new greenhouse gas inventory was developed together with a National Inventory Report and the inventory Biennial Update Report chapter.

Montenegro Climate Change Action MRV System

In cooperation with UNDP through the GEF funded project “Development of Montenegro’s Second BUR”, Aether has been supporting Montenegro in developing a monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) system for its climate change mitigation and adaptation actions.

Tanzania GHG Inventory, Projections and National System (MRV Portal)

Aether worked with the Vice President’s Office of the United Republic of Tanzania to develop an historical and projected GHG inventory and a sustainable national inventory system. The project delivered a tailored version of our innovative MRV portal. It was guided by high levels of stakeholder consultation and provided training to Tanzanian experts at two workshops.

Luxembourg Climate Action: Stakeholder engagement and reporting Portal

Aether developed an innovative online platform, or Portal, for gathering, analysing and reporting Luxembourg’s climate policies and measures. The Portal acts as a central point for stakeholder engagement and keeps a live master list of national climate actions, with associated impact and cost analysis.

Emission Inventory Support for Environment Agency of Iceland

Aether is supporting the Environment Agency of Iceland in the compilation of its greenhouse gas and air quality emissions inventories as well as projections and policies and measures. We are helping to ensure that Iceland’s inventory is robust and of high quality.

GHG inventory and QA/QC assistance in South Africa

On the road towards establishing a sustainable GHG inventory, Aether assisted South Africa's Department of Environmental Affairs to establish a National System for regular GHG estimation, analysis and reporting.

Testimonials

Don't just take our word for it...

“A heartfelt thank you to all the Aether team for this very comprehensive review – this is certainly turning out to be one of the most beneficial capacity building projects I have ever been involved in.”

Saviour Vassallo, Senior Environment Protection Officer, Malta Resources Authority

“It has been a pleasure to work with Chris Dore and Richard Claxton from Aether: they did their job in a very professional and timely manner. The workshop was organized and carried out in a cooperative spirit; the information provided to the workshop participants was complete and clear.”

Alina Novikova, UN/ECE Secretariat

“If we have a need for any more reports in the future Aether will be first on my list.”

Alan Hardy, Kyson Design

“Both the face-to-face training and the online version have been of high quality, with dynamic methods and a practical orientation that have allowed students to reach a solid knowledge base. The products have been delivered within the stipulated deadlines with an excellent quality and the team has always shown willingness to make adjustments according to the requirements of CONAF. We are very satisfied with the work. ”

Javier Cano Martín, Professional Unit for Climate Change and Environmental Services, CONAF (National Forestry Corporation), Chile

“The professional service provided by your company was of very high quality and completed within agreed timelines.”

Matthew Dudley, UNFCCC Secretariat

“Aether delivered training workshops and generated learning materials for our SSN members, providing technical content in a manageable and comprehendible format. We particularly benefitted from their extensive knowledge and ability to interpret the needs of our members into the training materials.”

Jennifer Anderson, Sustainable Scotland Network

“It is always an absolute pleasure working with Aether. I always know what is expected of me. Their work ethic is of a very high standard and projects are always handled in a very professional manner. I have learnt many skills in terms of project management, quality control and workshop training styles from Aether and I hope to carry these principles forward in my own work. I look forward to collaborating with Aether more in the future.”

Luanne Stevens, Gondwana

“The team at Aether works very professionally and communicates very well which makes working with them a pleasure. Outputs are delivered on time to high quality. The team brings the rigour of technical knowledge and expertise and finds innovative ways of communicating complex messages. I would be happy to recommend the Aether team to organisations working on analysing and presenting emissions information in the public domain.”

Fiona Glover, States of Jersey

“Aether's approach to couple innovative visualisation with high expertise manpower delivered valuable insights for our inventory work.”

Umweltbundesamt (Germany)

“Aether was a great asset in involving/engaging with Member States experts on highly technical subjects regarding GHG reporting. Very clear communication of issues and results.”

Andreas Pilzecker, DG CLIMA

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