On Thursday March 10, the Embassy attended the annual meeting with the Environment and Climate Research Center (ECRC). ECRC officially launched in February 2015 after a year-and-half of ground work. Norway signed an agreement with Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI) in June 2015 to support the establishment of the research center.
The Environment and Climate Research Center is a one year old research center based in Addis Ababa. ECRC is a part of the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI) and aims to support green and climate resilient development. The other two partner organizations behind the center are the Environment for Development Institute (EfD) and the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI).
The main goals of Norway’s support has been to develop ECRC’s organizational capability, capacity mobilization and start of ECRC’s core programs, development of rigorous plans for ECRC’s core programs for the period 2016-2020, and mobilization of resources for the implementation of planned programs. There is good progress so far and ECRC has quickly become a visible and good functional research center in just one year.
The reason behind the Environment and Climate Research Center is mainly Ethiopia’s strategy for a Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE). The goal of the CRGE is to sustain fast economic growth while increasing resilience and keeping emissions low at the 2010 level. To achieve this there is a need for policy-oriented research and knowledge management processes, and ECRC will be an important center for this work. ECRC will conduct real-time impact evaluation of the CRGE implementation process and serving as a meeting place for researchers and policy makers. The center’s main research themes are energy, forestry, water, agriculture, industry and urbanization.
Before the annual meeting the embassy also attended a workshop hosted by ECRC. The workshop, «Toward Developing Long-term Policy Research and Impact Evaluation Program in Support of the CRGE Strategy» focused on how ECRC can contribute to the CRGE Strategy in Ethiopia, and how the future work of the research center should look like. The workshop highlighted the importance of cooperation and sharing of information between different institutions. There is a need to fill research gaps and get a good overview of the sector, and ECRC can be the leader on this. H.E. Ato Belete Tafere, Advisor to the Prime Minister, and representatives from GGGI, EfD and the World Bank were among the speakers.
Source: Royal Norwegian Embassy Addis Ababa, Ethiopia