The Climate Protection Programme supports projects on various scales in partner countries. These projects centre on climate policy, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions (including CDM activities) and on fostering adaptation to climate change. Projects (co)financed and advised by the Climate Protection Programme are now carried out solely as a component of existing technical cooperation projects and programmes. This is in line with the Climate Protection Programme’s mission, namely to mainstream climate protection in Development Cooperation and thus also in the efforts undertaken by partner countries to foster sustainable development.

Such mainstreaming frequently presents particular challenges, for often neither counterpart specialists and managers nor GTZ advisors consider it matter-of-course to recognise climate protection as an additional, long-term development task. Therefore, one task now included during project preparation is to provide internal and external information on climate protection and raise awareness of the related issues among internal and external staff.

The partner organisations with which the Climate Protection Programme has been able to initiate (climate policy) processes and with whom concrete results have been achieved range from the governmental level through to local non-governmental organisations. The experience gained in these climate protection activities is taken up directly in German climate policy and is fed directly into the international climate process.

Key project topics are:

• Greenhouse gas inventories
  All developing countries must submit a national inventory of greenhouse gas emissions to the secretariat of the Climate Change Convention. These inventories provide a full, global and accurate picture of anthropogenic emissions. It is then possible to assess who the main emitters are and which emissions could be prevented or at least reduced. With the help of CaPP advisory services, many countries - for example Tanzania, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Colombia, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and China - have appraised their reduction potential, particularly for the energy and industrial sector.
• Mitigation
  The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) involves developing countries in Kyoto Protocol implementation on a voluntary basis. Through the CDM, greenhouse gas mitigation projects that generate "emission rights" can be carried out in developing countries. States or companies located in industrialised countries can then purchase these rights as a contribution to meeting their own limitation commitments. Before CDM projects can be carried out in a developing country, the country in question must establish a CDM approval authority - the Designated National Authority (DNA) - and adopt the relevant decision-making rules. GTZ has supported countries such as Indonesia, India and Viet Nam in that process. The identification and preparation of such projects in the individual sectors requires special expertise that must be built up through advisory inputs, such as those provided by the Climate Protection Programme: Countries benefiting from these advisory services include China, India, Chile and Indonesia.
• Adaptation to climate change
  The need to adapt to climate change is growing - for the adverse effects of climatic changes are increasingly making themselves felt. Poorer population groups are fundamentally unable to protect themselves against mounting weather extremes, such as flooding and longer periods of drought. The Climate Protection Programme therefore concentrates its initial activities upon target groups particularly affected by climate change in poor developing countries. For instance, in India survival strategies are being sought for people in water catchment areas in the arid state of Rajasthan under conditions of reduced water availability. In Mozambique, we are identifying ways in which disaster risk management can handle the increasingly frequent cyclones coming from the Indian Ocean.
• Overarching measures
  In addition to country-specific projects, the Climate Protection Programme also undertakes individual overarching climate policy measures. For instance, a group of scientists drawn from 13 institutions - mainly in developing countries - has engaged in intensive debate and produced courageous proposals showing how mitigation commitments could be distributed among industrialised countries upon expiry of the Kyoto Protocol. This effort is guided by the goal of achieving maximum "equity in the greenhouse (Earth)". The outcomes of this dialogue process hold the potential to influence future climate negotiations constructively. The Climate Protection Programme is supporting this process.
• Information and advisory services
  The Climate Protection Programme provides climate policy advice to development and environment ministries - not only through the participation of its staff in UNFCCC negotiations, but also through the ongoing harmonisation processes within the European Union. This activity area also includes advisory inputs on themes addressed by the Global Environment Facility and its corresponding projects.
  The Climate Protection Programme provides information through a number of channels: publishing the results of individual projects, distributing the monthly newsletter "CDM Highlights" by email, and preparing briefing papers on priority area themes.