UN Climate Change News, 4 September 2026 - One of the mandates contained in the Global Mutirão Decision , adopted at COP30, asks the UNFCCC secretariat to organize peer exchanges so countries can learn directly from each other on their national climate action plans, or NDCs. That mandate is no longer a plan on paper.
So far, at least 22 peer exchange events dedicated to NDCs have taken place across all six regions covered by the UNFCCC secretariat and its Regional Collaboration Centres (RCCs): Latin America, the Caribbean, MENA, Asia and the Pacific, West and Central Africa, and East and Southern Africa. Other events are scheduled for the coming months. From a workshop timed just ahead of pre-COP31 in the Pacific this October, to a masterclass on climate finance in Uganda, to a finance-focused programme in the Caribbean. The work looks different in every region, but the goal is the same: countries learning directly from each other on how to turn NDC commitments into action.
A mandate for countries to learn from each other
The Global Mutirão Decision adopted at COP30 requests the UNFCCC secretariat to organize peer exchange workshops so countries can share knowledge and good practices on developing and implementing NDCs, building on paragraph 117 of Decision 1/CMA.5 from the first global stocktake.
The timing matters. 2025 marked the end of the first NDC ambition cycle, with Parties submitting more ambitious NDC 3.0s. The question countries face now is not just what they've committed to, but how to turn ambition into financed, coordinated action. No country is answering that question entirely alone, and that is where the UNFCCC secretariat and its RCC are creating opportunities for countries to learn from each other's implementation journeys.
Six regions, one approach, many forms
What stands out is how "peer learning" is applied differently depending on what each region needs.
In the Pacific, where eleven countries have now submitted their NDC 3.0, one shared problem is coordination at scale: how do small, dispersed island administrations sequence limited resources and speak with one voice to international financiers? Pacific governments meeting in Fiji this September will do so through direct country-to-country dialogue, timed deliberately ahead of the pre-COP 31 also taking place in the Pacific this October.
Further west, in East and Southern Africa, an online peer masterclass on financing NDC implementation, drew on the Seychelles's own experience setting up a dedicated climate finance unit, alongside broader lessons in South-South cooperation together with Eswatini.
In West and Central Africa, the region took a narrower focus on the same underlying challenge: rural electrification rather than the whole of NDC implementation. Senegal, drawing on its own experience running a solar rural electrification programme, hosted Togo, Burkina Faso and Cameroon in Dakar. Each government left not with general lessons but with the beginnings of its own tailored plan, shaped by what the others had already tried.
Across MENA, the peer exchange runs in a different direction than most others. Rather than countries at a similar stage comparing notes, governments still finalizing their NDC 3.0 are paired directly with others already further into implementation, a shortcut past mistakes the more advanced countries have already made.
The Caribbean's Small Island Developing States face a version of the Pacific's problem: small economies, high per-unit costs, limited fiscal space. RCC Caribbean is answering it by fusing peer exchange with finance itself. At a workshop in Grenada this October, countries won't just describe their NDC implementation experience to each other. Each will walk through the same four questions: what challenge they faced, how they approached it, how it was financed and what they would tell another Caribbean country to do differently. All this before sitting down directly with funders like the Green Climate Fund and regional development banks in a structured, speed-dating-style format. It is peer learning designed to end not in a project someone can actually finance.
In Latin America, the region with the most peer exchange activity so far this year, the lesson countries kept returning to was institutional. Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Peru, Honduras and Paraguay each described the same realization: NDC implementation cannot sit with environment ministries alone, and must become a shared responsibility with finance, planning and sectoral authorities. A more technical version of the same scenario played out between two countries: Mexico, still building the architecture for its emerging carbon market, drew directly on Chile's years of lived experience with Article 6 governance
The common thread
Across a workshop in Fiji, a masterclass in Kampala, and a finance day in Grenada, the constant is the RCCs themselves: convening the right people and shaping a global mandate into an agenda that fits each region. Much of the value lies in the less visible work of building enough trust that a country will openly admit, in front of regional peers, what didn't work the first time. That openness is the entire value of peer learning: only by being honest about the obstacles can countries actually learn from one another.
With the pre-COP in the Pacific this October and COP31 on the horizon, this way of working is set to keep expanding.
