Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA) has received computing equipment that will be used for enhancing the Greenhouse Gases (GHG) national inventory. The equipment was provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in line with a cooperation Agreement on capacity building signed between REMA and FAO in April 2019.

The objective of the Agreement is to build capacity of Rwanda national experts to assist the country for fulfilling its international obligations by developing qualitative reports for United Nations Conventions including Climate Change, Biological Diversity and Desertification.

“This is the beginning of our collaboration. On behalf of REMA management, we thank you that you have provided these computers. We are going to use them for enhancing the GHG inventory, they can be used for other purposes but that's the main purpose of having them” said Faustin Munyazikwiye, the Deputy Director General of Rwanda Environment Management Authority.

The project has three areas of activities including land representation with collect earth and Greenhouse Gases (GHG) national inventory with a software such as agriculture and land use to help realize and submit agriculture, forestry and other land use national inventory in biennial update reports.

It also includes continuous cartographic and near real time monitoring of national and sub-national land mitigation activities, landscape restoration and environmental land monitoring on earth map, capacity building and software development, among others.

On behalf of FAO, Joseph Bizima said that FAO “appreciate our collaboration, it has been good for many years ago, we have been sharing a lot of information from REMA to FAO. We have to appreciate that Rwanda is among beneficiary countries of this project”

Under the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Parties have agreed to rules and modalities of measurement, reporting and verification for developing countries.

By measuring national GHG emissions, mitigation actions and their effects, and by reporting such information in National Communications every four years and Biennial Update Reports (BURs) every two years, the Rwanda Environment Management Authority needs enough equipment to be able to collect enough data to share in communication reports.

“We are going to share information and I hope that our cooperation is going to be strengthened” concluded Mr Bizima.