Thank you, Martin. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to colleagues joining from across time zones. My name is Lorraine Roenke and I am the global lead for scaling Knowledge and Innovation. It's my great pleasure on behalf of the entire team working on the important agenda of scaling Solutions, to welcome you to our flagship program on Scaling Next Generation Rice. This is an impact program with the objective of facilitating knowledge sharing among World Bank Group knowledge partners of all types, client countries, research organizations, universities, private sector partners, on innovative policies, on technologies, on practices and successful public and private scaling engagements, that can improve rice production systems for farmers and for the planet. So, it's all about the what to scale and the how to scale. To ensure that the right folks who want to be around the table are around the table, we've developed this virtual platform, Connecting for Impact. Next slide, please, on which knowledge to which you can all contribute will be curated, shared, and where webinars such as today's will be hosted. Scanning this QR code will permit you to join the community of practice for future activities and contributions. We will be showing this QR code again at the end of the event today, so please don't worry. We welcome now everyone to focus in at this time on the very first of our impact programs virtual events on the all-important topic of MRV. Today is historic, so we do need VIPs. And for this, allow me to introduce you to our acting World Bank Group Global Knowledge Director for farming and agribusiness, Marianne Grohild, to open our first session in our Measurement Matters, Sustainable Pathways for Next Generation Rice. Marianne. Thank you very much, uh, Lorraine, and, uh, good morning, good afternoon and good evening, everyone joining us. It's my pleasure to open this webinar series on monitoring, reporting, and verifying greenhouse gas emissions from rice. It's a topic on which we've received a lot of interest. Why does it matter? Rice feeds about 4 billion people and supports the livelihoods of more than 100 million workers globally, mostly small farmers. It's central to food security, in particular across South and East Asia. At the same time, methane from flooded rice fields is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Paddy rice production is responsible on average for 16% of agricultural methane emissions. So reducing methane emissions in rice fields presents an immediate opportunity for climate action. And if we can achieve this without affecting rice yields or farmers' livelihoods, then we can both provide environmental benefits and develop stronger high-quality rice production systems. The core message today is simple, measurement matters. High integrity, science-based measurement of greenhouse gas emissions is the foundation of credibility for climate action and impact at scale. It allows to quantify outcomes, to demonstrate environmental integrity, and to unlock finance. So verifiable climate results can translate into real predictable incentives for farmers. Getting MRV right means meeting expectations around additionality, accuracy, and transparency. While also aligning with national reporting of agriculture greenhouse gas emissions. In this session, you'll get 3 things. First, a clear view of agricultural greenhouse gas accounting choices and the techniques, methods, and trade-offs behind them. Second, lessons on what's working in rice MRV across South and East Asia and the opportunities that are lying ahead. And third, a window into how ARV can be structured at scale. For example, through programs like Vietnam's Drive for high-quality, low-emission rice. We'll also discuss what readiness looks like to engage carbon markets and mobilize carbon finance. The World Bank Group's role is to convene and to support both with knowledge and finance. Through the scaling NextGen Rice Impact Program, we are working with governments, with researchers, with market actors to accelerate the adoption of proven agronomic practices such as alternate wetting and drying, better nutrient management, and the use of higher yield, lower emission varieties. Just as important, we're helping countries build the systems that make this stick, fit for purpose data and digital MRV, institutional coordination, and alignment with evolving market standards. Of course, this is not an easy task. We must balance rigor with practicality and cost so that MRV can move beyond pilots to scale. We must prevent displacement of emissions and ensure additionality as we need to keep farmers and we need to keep farmers' benefits also front and center. And we also need to reduce transaction costs by aligning national inventories, project accounting, and market requirements. So my recommendation for all of us today is the following. 1, invest in readiness. Capacity, institutions and data systems that meet international technical standards. 2, design financing pathways, pairing public programs with markets so verified outcomes become stable, performance-based payments for farmers. And free, share and learn. Use this series to exchange lessons, align on methodologies, and build scalable models for Asia and beyond. Thank you very much to our speakers and partners for bringing your experience to this discussion today. We can turn measurement into momentum, linking credible MRV with finance to deliver climate, productivity, and livelihood gains at scale. I look forward to our conversation today. Thank you. Thank you very much, Marianne and Lorraine, for getting us started today. Welcome everyone. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. It's great to see that Next Generation Rice attracts that much interest across 18 hour across an 18 hour time difference. We're having a global group of participants connected here today. Welcome. My name is Alex Lodge. I'm senior climate finance specialist in the same department as Lorraine and Marian, the farming and agribusiness, the global department of the World Bank, and I'll be moderating you through the session today. Thank you for connecting. Before we begin, a few housekeeping things, you see the agenda projected here. We have two main blocks today. First, we will have a series of presentations interspersed by interactive polls where we can engage you on some of the technical information that is presented, but also gauge who you are and what interest and what skills and backgrounds you bring to this conversation. The second part of the session will be in breakout groups. This is where you have the opportunity to interact with the experts. It also most importantly with your peers to exchange your knowledge and your information and really stimulate the exchange of knowledge and knowledge about technologies with your peers around next generation rise. Uh, before we continue, um, a few more housekeeping items. First of all, please, I think you can move to the next slide. Martin, please mute your microphones. We do appreciate if you can turn on video later on bandwidth and circumstances permitting. Please also participate actively during the interactive polls that we have inserted into the program, especially in the first part. For those joining us and requiring Mandarin interpretation, you will have discovered hopefully in the chart some instructions to this effect. There are 3 dots at the bottom of the screen that allows you to access interpretation. You can access the English and Mandarin or Chinese channel there. If you could also please identify yourselves in the chat um requiring a Chinese interpretation later when we go into the breakout groups, we want to make sure that you're together with the right interpreter. Um, As I said, we will have bigger groups later on with active participation. One thing we hope to do is that country participants, participants who are working actively on Next Generation rise in a particular country, could participate and play a role of rapporteur back to the plenary at the end of today's session. Um, at the end of the session we'll also have a QR code with feedback, and that would be very much appreciated if you are generous with your feedback so we can tailor future webinars in this series to meet your needs, as you have already gathered, the session is being recorded and materials will be shared on the compact for impact website for those who cannot participate or for those who want to return to the messages that we're discussing today. One more thing, and I see some of you have done that already. If you could please go into the Webex application. There are 3 dots next to your video that allow you to rename yourself. It would be great to know who's connected, so we don't have just generic names. Please identify your name and country if you're working on a country program. Um, if you're a World Bank staff, indicate your name dash WBG. And if you're from one of our partner organizations, uh, indicate your name and say regional or global, so we roughly know what scope of work you you have. The interpreters have been identifying themselves as such, though, as you scroll through the video icons of the participants, you will see two interpreters who interpreting to and from Chinese Mandarin. OK, that is for the housekeeping, as you heard from Lorraine and Marianne, today's topic is on measurement reporting and verification. The letters that we use a lot and sometimes perhaps a bit too casually, and we will get insights and instructions from experts to this effect where this idea comes from and what purpose it serves. Before we um do that, um, let me lay out the objectives of today's session. So first of all, we want to help you understand and for us to learn from each other. What robust, scalable MRB systems for rice related emissions consist of? What are the important building blocks? We want to explore how repeated and high quality measurements at scale can unlock climate finance. That's an ultimate objective of this this task and of key interest to many of you working on low emissions rice production in countries. And as you will have gathered, we will combine global and regional expertise and insights and hopefully generate a vibrant exchange during the second part of the session and create some momentum that we can carry forward into other webinars and interactions with this cohort and a group of participating participants. And so with that said, I think we now come to our first poll, and that is really for us to gauge where you are in relation to MRN V, the two terms and concepts that we discuss and disentangled in great detail today. There's a QR code on the screen, even though I'm very reluctant to tell you to go on your phones during the session. This is a moment to do so. If you could please take out your and I think a corresponding link to the QR code that you see on the screen will also appear in the chat if you're already working on a phone. Uh, please scan it and rate how your level of rate your level of expertise on the topic of MRV from 1 to 5 from novice to expert. That gives us a little bit of sense where you are in your knowledge, what your interest is, and that will help our presenters gauge how they can interact with you later. So if you could just take a minute to do that, I'd appreciate that. Great. Thank you very much for your active participation. I see we're skewed towards the left of this chart, meaning there's a fair amount of you who are beginners or moderate experts in the in the topic of MRB and that's really very much the idea of this webinar. We hope that you can learn and take away important lessons for your work at home on this, this topic, and this is why we have aligned. Several experts to guide us through this topic and enlighten us what they have to share. So with that, we can perhaps end the poem and move on with the presentations, the main segment of our session. And I'm very pleased to welcome Andrea Pickering. She wears many hats, but she's here as a leading researcher at the Global Research Alliance, which is a global partnership and network of experts on greenhouse gas accounting. Who work on various parts of the sector, including on low emissions rice. Uh, Andrea, we appreciate very much that you're joining us at your midnight hour in New Zealand, uh, to walk us through. Key features of what makes a rigorous and scalable MRV system for rice and you will get us warmed up on the key concepts, terminology, the methods and so some of the important considerations as we use MRV in the context of national reporting but also as a tool to access climate finance. So with these remarks, please welcome Andrea Pickering. Uh, with the first presentation, each presenter has about 15 minutes, and again, we'll intersperse these presentations with short balls where we query your absorption of the knowledge that's being conveyed here. With that over to you, Andrea. Many thanks, Alex, um, and I, I appreciate being invited to, uh, present at this webinar. Um, and apologies to those of you who may know, uh, all the information I've got, I will be presenting, uh, this evening. Um, just obviously, it's a good opportunity to try and get everybody sort of up to speed and be starting at sort of the common level. Uh, so next slide, please. Uh, so talking of getting everybody to the next level, sort of the same level, just obviously we want to touch on what, what is MRV, as Alex said, it stands for Measurement, reporting and verification. And throughout the course of this presentation, I will be just touching on those three words and actually defining them a little bit further. I did just want to note that the the term MRV was originally brought in. Uh, during the Kyoto Protocol period of the UNFCCC reporting side of things. Um, it was a protocol, I guess, or a process of guidance for developing countries and the reporting under the Kyoto Protocol. So that was under the national communications and the Bial update reports. So under the Kyoto. The protocol was very different between developed and developing countries. Um, but under the Paris Agreement, it's everything is very common. Um, so they've enhanced the MRV side of things and they're now actually terming it enhanced transparency framework. For those, so for those of you who have heard that term, um, and sort of wondering how it all reports to the MRV side of things, it is effectively the same as MRV, uh, the MRV process, um, but now it is applicable to all countries. So, um, everything is, um, whether you're developed or developing, the, the process is the same. Um, and even though it may be termed now enhanced transparency framework, it's still an opportunity using the term MRV. Uh, to step through each of those terms and to understand even the enhanced transparency framework better. So it's, it's not a bad thing to still be using, um, MRV. But at the same time, a lot of people do misuse the term. So, um, as far as the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement is concerned, it's, it's always a good idea to have a clear understanding of what it actually means. So, MRV, um, as I said, it's, it's under the UNFCCC. It's, uh, relates to the greenhouse gas emissions, emissions reductions, um, in relation to your targets and your nationally determined contributions. Um, and so it's all about those, the emissions accounting. Uh, so next slide, please. Um. Yeah. So, um, measurement. So the first term for M is measurement. Now, measurement doesn't refer to the actual physical measurement of the emissions. A lot of people think that measurement under MRV means going out and, uh, collecting data, doing the research. Research and, and doing that measurement. But as, as far as the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC is concerned, measurement actually means the estimation of the greenhouse gas emissions by the sources and the removals by sinks. So at that national level through your national greenhouse gas inventories. So, It's unfortunate they use the term measurement because it actually means estimation. It's the accounting side of things. That's where you bring everything together and you use, uh, the IPCC guidelines and you actually crunch those numbers to estimate what your emissions are. So, uh, talking of the IPCC, uh, guidelines, um, they are guidelines that have been provided for countries to use to help them estimate their emissions. And they provide various levels of, uh, methodologies with various levels of complex. around them. So the first level is what we call tier one. This is a very, very basic, um, methodology. It uses the IPCC tier one equations and it uses default values and very, very little country-specific data. So what that means is that you, um, Uh, you, the, the emissions that you estimate using Tiwa generally are not very country, um, they're not really related to the country. They're, they're not very specific. They're very inaccurate, but they still mean that countries can start getting a vague idea of what's important in their country, what is producing the most emissions in their country. Um, and, um, so it's a good starting point and, and, and everybody has to have a starting point. We can't go all into a tier 2 or a tier 3. We, we need to start somewhere. The other thing about a tier one is because the methodology is so basic, you can't actually demonstrate a reduction of your emissions using a tier one methodology. You have to move on to a tier 2 methodology to actually start demonstrating the reduction in emissions. Um, I say that, but you could reduce your emissions through using tier one, but the only way to do that is to actually reduce your activity. So that would mean reducing your animal numbers, reducing your rice production, reducing, um, your agricultural activity, which is not what we want to do because we want to protect food security and people's livelihoods. So it's really important that we do strive to move towards a tier 2. Tier two starts becoming a bit more complex. The IPCC provides some equations that people can use, um, and they, uh, are slightly more complex, but use more country-specific data. Um, but at the same time, you do have the opportunity to use in some places, some defaults, so that if you don't have all of the country-specific data to start with, um, you can actually start with what you've got and slowly improve over time. And then right at the top of the pyramid, we've got the tier 3, which they're very, very complex, very country-specific, and the most accurate. Um, but, so that's just to give you an overview of the different tiers. So, next slide, please. So why is it, um, and, and why is it important to, to estimate your greenhouse gas emissions at that national level? Because that is really quite vital to do that. It's so that we can determine baselines and, and baselines are important. In order to start helping you determine what your reduction targets are. As I said, with an understanding of what your emissions are, you can start identifying what is producing the highest amount of emissions in your country or what, what sectors or what sources. And so therefore, what to, uh, what to concentrate your targets on. It also helps to identify your priority areas for improvement and your limited resources that all countries have, whether you're developing or developed. Every country has limited resources. And so you need to prioritize where you put those and, and with, um, an understanding of what your baseline is and, and what is the priority areas, you can start focusing those resources. Um, as I said, so the basis of a low emissions policies and, um, and your strategies, you need to be able to assess those. Um, and so without a, without a baseline and without, uh, a methodology to include the data, uh, from your emissions policies and strategies, without that, you can't actually assess and demonstrate how you're actually reducing those emissions. Um, also helps prioritize your research. So, um, in order to reduce your emissions, obviously, we, we do depend a lot on research. And so, um, again, it helps you prioritize that. And it's also helps facilitate access to carbon, carbon finance without an inventory, without that basis. You can't reach out to funders and, and seek carbon finance because they need to know where you are at. If they don't know where you're at, if you don't know where you're at with your emissions, they don't know, and so they don't know how to support you. They don't know where your priorities are, and they are less likely to give you any carbon finance. Um, next slide, please. So, obviously, it's very important to develop very robust, um, inventories, um, and greenhouse gas emissions estimates. So, in order to do that, it's, it's important to follow the IPCC guidelines and to, to move up through those tiers, um, as much as you possibly can. The UNFCCC also provides what we call the tech principles. So TAC stands for transparent. So that's around the documentation around ensuring clarity on how your emissions are estimated. And documentation is very important with anything that you do. If you don't have clarity on where, how you got those numbers, then, uh, you, people who are looking at your work, and, and if they don't understand where it comes from, then they start, um, being unsure on whether your emissions are actually, um, accurate or whether you've missed something out. So that leads us into the other principles. Accuracy. So as far as practical, as far as you possibly can, your emissions need to be neither over nor underestimating your emissions. Again, moving through those tiers and moving to the higher tiers and using more and more country-specific data will help that accuracy. Consistency is around the time series, you need to have a common methodology across your entire time series, because otherwise, you don't know if a change in your emissions over time is due to actually reducing your emissions, or whether it's actually due to a change in methodology or data set. Comparability, that's really important as well, so that countries can actually look at their emissions and know that what they, the estimates that they are producing are comparable to the other countries and complete as around as making sure you've covered off all of your sources and sinks that they've all been included and you haven't left anything out. If you follow all of these principles, it means that you are less likely going to be accused of what we call greenwashing or gaming the system, or, um, another basically being accused of, um, not producing accurate or realistic numbers. Uh, next slide, please. Um, so we talked about the higher tiered methodologies. And so as I said, they're really important for accuracy and accounting of the emissions reductions so that you can actually incorporate that data, that country-specific data, and the data that you are getting from your different projects, um, and your, um, and your low carbon strategies, and you can actually incorporate it into your inventory so that you can demonstrate, um, um, demonstrate that you're reducing the emissions. So with rice in particular, um, uh, it's the IPC doesn't, um, provide a lot of guidance, um, around, sorry, they provide a lot of guidance on the tier one, but then with the tier two, it's a very similar, uh, Um, equation or methodology. Um, but what actually happens is you need to start collecting country-specific data to change what we call scaling factors that, um, impact the emission factor that's actually used. And this is the scaling factors are based on things like how much organic matter is applied, uh, what your production system is, whether you have a wetting and drying, how long the wet season is. And these are all very important because methane is produced through the rice paddies. Um, production systems through decomposition of organic matter, and decomposition of the organic matter and methane from that is impacted on sort of the moisture levels and sort of how long the rice paddy is in water for and and sort of how much organic matter is there. Uh, next slide, please. So this is just a few pictures of some research equipment of estimating emissions from rice paddy fields. I just thought you might like to see these. If you haven't already seen similar pictures or actually been out in the field yourself, you can see that there's quite a lot of equipment here and it measures the methane and in some instances, the nitro. oxide from the rice paddy fields. So the theory behind this is you, you do this research, you develop your baseline, and then you can start, um, applying different, uh, research with different technologies and then, um, to the field and, and then measure the emissions coming from them and seeing if there's a difference from your baseline. Next slide, please. So, that's, we've moved on from measurement now and moving on to reporting. So, reporting under sort of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement is just the reporting that you have to give to the UNFCCC. So under the, uh, uh, UNFCCC or the under the convention, it's your national communications, and under the Paris Agreement, it's your biennial transparency reports and your nationally determined contributions. And REDD Plus is actually voluntary. So biennial transparency report is the key one, for demonstrating what your emissions are and tracking what your reductions are happening. These actually supersede your binary update reports. Um, and for a developed country, we still actually have to do a national, a national inventory report every year in the intervening years. So the reporting, um, if it wasn't with the UNFCCC, the reporting would be any reports that are documenting what's been going on and, um, you know, what your methodologies are and what your results are. So, that's the reporting side of things. Our next slide, please. So, um, you can, sorry, click again and just, um, if you could. This slide is just to, um, demonstrate the, the national inventory report. So that is the, the inventories, that's the estimations of your, uh, um, your, your emissions. And you can see here that it's very important across all of the reporting. So for developed countries, it's the greenhouse gas inventories, um, the national communications, and also the BTRs, which are common. And our biennial reports are now superseded by the biennial transparency reports. And for developing countries, the biennial update reports have been superseded by the biennial transparency reports. And then obviously National communications as well. So you can see that while different report, uh, reporting areas are different under the different reports, the national inventory estimations is common across all of them. Next slide, please. So, verification under the MRV is, is not verifying of the actual activity data and research data. You can basically view it as quality assurance. So this is about, um, the technical expert reviews and the facilitative multilateral consideration of progress, which is like a Q&A. So this is now common across all parties to the Paris Agreement. So whether you're developed or developing, The quality assurance or the review process is the same for everybody. Under the Kyoto Protocol, it was actually very, very different. Um, so that's what verification means in, in this context. Uh, next slide, please. So I just wanted to move quickly and just touch very briefly on sort of carbon markets, because I know that these later presentations that will go into this in more detail. Um, and I know through the the course that you'll be learning more on this as well. So, the carbon markets fall under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. And again, it builds on the Kyoto, some of the stuff that was under the Kyoto Protocol. So, Article 6.2 talks about Um, basically, the, the selling and buying of units between countries. And this is where a country may have reduced their emissions more than they thought they were going to and more than they thought than they've reported in the national communi, uh, sorry, in their nationally determined contribution. And so they've got what we call sort of sort of excess units, um, which they, if they wish, can sell to another country that may need those units to reduce their emissions down to their target. Uh, under Article 6.4, uh, this is not so much around units, but it's where one country may provide finance to, to another country through, uh, just financing, through capability building, through, um, uh, transfer of technology, all of that. And then basically there's a market mechanism that runs through the UNFCCC registry, um, and, and so that's what that one is. And, next slide, please. So with Article 6.2, I did just want to demonstrate this. This was a very nice diagram just to demonstrate how, as I said, with the surplus emissions reductions there, and if they've got surplus, then they can be sold to another country, and then that makes up the NDC target. But it's really, really important that you don't have double accounting. If you've sold your units to another country, you can't then use it in your reporting of your NDC and you can't use them going forward as well. So, you need to be very careful about when, you know, you, you sell any units and buying any units because, um, you don't want to have this double accounting. Uh, next slide, please. So with the voluntary carbon market, it's not actually formally part of Article 6, but the, the units out of it can actually be integrated and authorized within, um, and align with Article 6. So it's how they're treated, how the projects are set up, uh, will determine whether or not it can be under Article 6 or not. And we, again, you need to make sure you don't have the risk of double, um, double accounting. Now, the interesting thing with the voluntary carbon market units is that often the sale and buying of these units is between organizations. And funnily enough, if an organization sells the units to another organization, um, it doesn't actually impact you at a national level. You can still use those units, you can in your NDC. So that's quite a, Um, a, a difference between the carbon credits that you would develop under 6.2. So there's a bit of a difference there. Um, and I just wanted to note here about the integrity council, which basically they aim to ensure that there's high integrity around there. So it's a very different system and set up with different standards. Next slide, please. P I'm going to be running out of time soon. So, very quickly talked about different standards. Um, they tend to have their own methodologies depending on what the standard is. Um, but they tend, they often might be, um, consistent with the IPCC guidelines, and you want to make sure that if you're going to be using any units, uh, developed through the voluntary carbon market, um, you need to make sure that their methodology is in line with the IPCC guidelines if you're wanting to use it in your NBCs. Uh, next slide, please. Which I think is my last slide. Um, so basically, um, you've just some key, uh, take-home messages. They don't replace with your voluntary card mark, they don't replace national accounting. They sit alongside it. Um, they can help mobilize finance because bringing in different projects, but they don't remove the need for the credible national inventory, the NDC tracking system. Um, and, and as I've sort of said throughout, you know, there is a risk of a double, uh, double counting or double claiming. That's more of a risk rather than measurement error. So you need to make sure that you are, um, being, um, that the integrity is there, um, and making sure that when you set up the projects in your country, that you're taking all of these different things into account. But as I said, going forward, I think there's a lot more on this, and I just wanted to introduce the concepts. So I think that's me. Thank you, Andrea. I appreciate it very much getting us started here and oriented towards these important concepts and explaining both the the history and the purpose of the M, the R and the V as, as you got us oriented here. Uh, we'll be moving to the next presentation in a moment, but as I said, we'll be interspersing these presentations with short polls. You already practiced, how you can use your phone. To participate in one of those polls again, uh, uh, pull out your phone and scan the QR code that is appearing on the screen. And you also should find a corresponding link and here really what you want to do is really reflect for a minute or so. What is the one thing or the two things that stood out from the presentation that Andrea just provided. The idea was to give a broad overview of the concepts, but also indicate how these these functions associated with measurement reporting and verification relate to carbon markets and the various mechanisms under the Paris Agreement and we'll get into those. A much more later on. So we'll just give you a short um uh a minute or so uh to, to type. It doesn't have to be a sentence, could be keywords, but if you can just um express what you're taking away from here. And Katie, if you could sort of be in your starting blocks for the next presentation. OK, great. Uh, so I, I see the first respondents already indicating that it is very useful to straighten out some of the terminology, uh, but also the difference between Article 6.2 and 4, and how that relates to MRNV at the national level. Um, also I see that's um the, the progression that countries go through as they move through from tier 1 to tier 2 to 3. Great, thank you very much. um. In the interest of time, please feel free to keep adding a few, few of these reactions into the chat. But in the meantime, we can start staging Katie's presentation. The next presenter is Katie Nelson, climate change specialist with the International Rice Research Institute. And as you can gather from the name of her organization, Rice is what what they do at the Erie. And Katie will now give us an overview of what is happening on MRV and low emissions rise reporting measurement reporting and verification across the region. She will highlight some of the differences across countries, but also dive a little bit deeper into the kind of methodologies that countries can use to measure emissions associated with rice production. With that brief introduction, uh, very welcome, Katie. Also appreciate it very much that you're joining us at an advanced evening hour in Vietnam, and the next 15 minutes are yours. Thank you very much. Over to you. Thank you very much. Um, yes, Welcome, everyone. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak. We can move ahead to the first slide of my presentation, please. Yeah And I think we can already go ahead and jump to the next slide, um, as Alex has already introduced that I'll be talking about a regional overview. Um, so here we have a little bit of a picture of uh Southeast Asia, and the agricultural mitigate mitigation potential um in livestock nutrient management and rice. And what you can see from this, um, this graph here is that rice in the majority of these countries has very high mitigation potential compared to other agriculture sectors. And that's also just because rice is produced at scale in these countries. Um, a benefit to this, as Andrea has already introduced, is that there are existing rice sector methodologies for carbon markets. Um, and she briefly had some slides, um, up on Vera and gold standard. I will also mention those a little bit later in the slide, but won't go into detail on the methodologies. Um, what's very important to pay attention to here is that depending on the intention of how a country or a project wants to use the emission reduction credit is what will determine the methodology and, and also will determine the value of that, um, verified emission reduction unit and also the eligibility for things like climate financing. So the approach is, is incredibly important for um the scale and, and that's also because of the cost of the different approaches, and then the market access. Please go to the next slide. So, what we really want to drive home here is that when it comes to the results-based carbon financing, um, that this requires verification according to a specific standard. And depending on the, um, the approach or the agreement under that climate finance, we'll determine what that specific standard is. Um, please go ahead to the next, you can just skip forward to, I think there's, yeah, one more. Oh, whoops, can you go back one? Thanks. Um, so, what verification does is that it, uh, provides the evidence that change has occurred. Um, MRV is the mechanism for which we can account for that change. And broadly across Asia, the national level MRV varies relatively significantly. Now you can go to the next slide. OK, so here we're diving into a little bit more detail of the different countries. And, um, what's really important is to, to notice here in the, um, in the table is that rice MRV by country varies significantly by which tier they're using. Um, the majority of the countries are using still the tier one. And, um, this also reflects what their data sources, the quality of their data is, and also what their financial readiness in order to be able to take on results-based climate finance. And, uh, we can see in the, in the table here that, um, as the, the majority of most countries are at tier one, that means that they're not ready to, uh, work with results-based climate finance at this stage. Another important point to note is that there are no countries that have a fully operational nationalized MRV system in place, and that is being used regularly. So we can see here, um, one of the countries, Vietnam, um, does have several national pilots, and we're going to get into much more detail in the next presentation on, on that and what the meaning of that is in terms of being closer to being results-based climate finance ready. Uh, so, another country, China, does also report, oops, sorry, can you go back? Yeah, um, China does have some tier 3 that is reported in their NDCs, but this is specific to certain project sites, um, where they're using modeling and flux, greenhouse gas flux chambers. Um, Thailand is also an interesting case, as they have a national, um, Thai verification system called TER, specific for, um, alternate wetting and drying, and, but that cannot be traded in their emission trading scheme. So, uh, across all these countries, there are some countries that do have national emission trading schemes, but none of them include rice. And also we can see from this slide, all of the national, uh, all of the countries, um, don't have any national MRV framework except for a very recent um publication of the National MRV framework in Vietnam, which was, I think, published in November of 2025. OK, go ahead to the next slide, please. Now, when we get into the different approaches of MRV when we're talking about reporting for, um, climate mitigation goals or towards NDC goals, versus when we're talking about, um, the MRV that's required for climate finance. Um, uh, for NDCs, uh, those are basically going to be at tier one, but we do see countries moving towards tier two. And um that is being driven primarily by the fact that climate finance may be available and can also help to support financing their NDCs through the conditional conditional targets. So, the climate finance would demand tier 2 and above, as well as a system of third-party verification. And now, this table shows what are, uh, in terms of the different, um, aspects like the, the type of tier that's used and the, the Quality of the data that's collected, um, the checks and balances and costs and outcomes that we can see comparing between the two, that there's a significant additional lift in added effort when we move from just reporting to NDCs versus attracting climate finance. And, um, when we move from one tier to the next, as Andrea has already mentioned, this includes, um, you know, measurements to get country specific and even region specific and seasons specific emission factors, which also require um additional ground truthing at scale. And then when we move into tier 3, those are much more um high quality data specific models. Data collection becomes a much heavier lift when we're talking about climate finance, um, and then in addition, you have much higher fees in terms of the audits, the verification fees, and, um, uh, the training and other things that are required to get, to get to this climate finance stage. Please move to the next slide. So this just shows a picture of the difference between the compliance market and the voluntary markets. Um, we've already introduced some of these about Article 6 and then within domestic carbon markets. So that was where Andrea talked about like if two organizations are trading with each other within the same country, then those emission reduction credits are still going towards the NDC. Um, when we're talking about voluntary markets, there's two methodologies that are recognized. One is through the gold standard registry, and the other is through the Vera carbon registry. Can you move to the next slide? Or I mean, just forward one. So, what's really important here to notice is that all of the uh methodologies that are here within this, this box, um, all have the same type of data and input criteria for estimation. Now, that may be um at different levels of um sampling and uh at different stages. But when we move to tier 3, and this box should actually include the first part of the VR methodology where it says IPCC tier 1 and 2, but when we move to the, the biogeochemical modeling in tier 3, that requires very extensive data collection for the calibration and validation of those models, and that is done according to another specific methodology, um, both of which are available online. The challenge is that cost and the type and quality of data are very limiting factors, particularly, um, when you're starting from, you know, almost no data. At least not data that has been collected frequently and in the same way over time. OK, please move to the next slide. Next slide, yeah, thanks. So now I'm going to give a little bit of an overview of the different approaches and what are some of the pros and cons of those approaches. So, as mentioned before, the majority of countries that um are do collect, I'm sorry, I haven't mentioned this, the majority of countries are already collecting data on yield and the rice area that is planted um either yearly or seasonally. And this is done to manage food security and trade. Um, what can be done, because these are existing reporting structures and reporting lines, is to integrate what we would call observed activity data. And so these are these reporting officers who are generally based at the village or commune level, who are reporting like percent of Area that's planted, adding in a few additional questions to that reporting structure. And those questions are around water management, nitrogen fertilizer rate, and straw, or other types of organic amendment incorporated that's incorporated, um, into the rice fields. The pros of this are that it's very cost effective, um, it contributes to national data inventories and public data resources that can help a country move from tier 1 to tier 2, and it is a transparent reporting structure. The cons to this are that, um, it does need digitization and in many, many countries, um, they're still using, you know, pen and paper or, um, being, you know, taking pictures and sending that to the next level of reporting. And it's very disconnected, um, which leaves a lot of room for human error. And so, the digitization process can be complex and, and costly. Uh, it also requires the reporters to report additional information, which adds some more burden to them. It does require ownership at the national level since this needs to go through the national reporting structures, and it's not accepted by global standards because it lacks the rigor for, uh, climate finance. Next slide, please. This will be on project level MRB oops, 11 back, um. Can you go back one slide, please? Yeah. So, project level MRV, um, the difference between this is that you're collecting data from individual farmers at the field level. Um, this is typically self-reported data, so, uh, it doesn't necessarily include sensors and other things. But it's mostly farm logbooks and the digitized or handwritten versions of those. That aligns with the IPCC requirements. It, this, it does align to the voluntary carbon market standards, so it can be used for climate finance and carbon credits. Uh, it enables tracking change over time, and it can also be used for traceability of products, to be able to certify products as low emission, uh, low emission rice products. The cons of this are that it does require that you interview the farmers directly. You could also train farmers to do this, but there will be digital literacy constraints and also connection constraints. Um, also, self-reported data alone on its own has less trust for carbon buyers, and there will be a discount for that additional uncertainty because of that. OK, next slide. Closed chamber measurements are where we're talking about the, the physical measurements at the field level. And we also saw some pictures from Andrea's presentation here. Um, according to the voluntary market standards, which very often are the basis for designing bilateral trade agreements or other types of climate finance. If you're going to use closed chamber measurements, it requires 3 chambers per field and per level of stratification. And the way that you would stratify, which is also going to be explained in more detail in the next, um, in the next presentation, is you would stratify by season, soil type, and farm management practices. So, in really highly variable systems, you may have hundreds if not thousands of different strata. So that's just something to keep in mind. The benefits to this are that it has a high level of accuracy and trust. Cons are that it's very costly, so it's not sustainable at scale, um, it's very labor and equipment intensive and has still high variability between fields. Next slide. Some field sensor options which cannot be used alone on their own because they don't capture all the data, but they can be added to self-reporting or observed reporting for, um, additional trust. This measures the water levels in the field, so you can see if you have reached, uh, an actual drainage event. Um, it does increase the accuracy of water level data and, um, that adds reliability to the self-reporting. The manual tubes, what we can see in the picture here can be very low cost. It's just a PVC pipe with some holes in it, and, um, it, it can cost around $1 to $3 per farms, and they also last for a very long time. The cons, particularly when we get into, um, automated water level sensors, is that, um, those have a short life. Um, so we have tested some of these in the field and they lasted about two seasons. So, you know, uh, they cost around $200 to $400 and only last two seasons. It's not, not very good payoff, um, structure, and that's just because there's a lot of Uh, sensitive parts, and they're out in the, um, in the rain and in the, the elements. This also adds an extra burden on farmers as the record keepers to go out and check the water levels, um, and because they're, you add an additional, um, tool, it, it, it increases the cost. Next slide. Remote sensing is a very interesting approach, and it is progressing very quickly. Um, so the benefits of remote sensing is that you're using a proxy to determine what's happening at the farm level. So you use a proxy of whether there's water on the surface of the field to determine, um, whether there has been a drainage event or not. This has the highest level of accuracy from uh when you have well calibrated and validated uh uh models that go with this, and it has a very high level of trust from buyers. The cons to this are that there is extensive ground truthing to be able to validate and calibrate the remote sensing models. There are very long Passover gaps that will potentially miss drainage events. So the, the, right now I think the Passover time is between 12 and 14 days, and so it's very likely that you could miss all of the drainage events and then not credit where in fact credit is due. And so you could be overestimate overestimating emissions and also undercutting farmers. It requires very heavy computing power, which is also costly, and cloud cover impedes the images. So NISA is a new public publicly available satellite that has just been launched a couple of months ago, and we're hoping that this is going to move this forward quickly. But thus far, there hasn't, there's been a lot of research in this area, but there's more restrictions and limitations than we have been able to really move through to um active systems that can, that can work at scale and for low cost. Next slide. I think it's my last. Oh, last, OK, this is my last slide then. So then we moved to the biogeochemical models, and these are things like DNDC, um. Erie also has the riza model that's going to have a greenhouse gas module. The benefits to these are that there's also very high accuracy, so low levels of uncertainty. Um, this is where we're talking about tier 3 is in these biogeochemical models. This accounts for multiple changes all at the same time in farm practices, so you can account for changes in nitrogen and changes in the length of the season, plus water management all at once. Has a very high level of trust from buyers as well. The cons are that it is incredibly data intensive. You need to have or get like soil samples, um. Regularly from the fields in order to calibrate and validate these models to an acceptable degree of uncertainty that is going to be accepted by either voluntary markets or for other types of climate finance. So that makes them difficult to use in smallholder systems because there is a lot of variability across farms, so you'd have to calibrate and validate many models for each of those different strata. And then um lastly, the DNDC model is also copyrighted. OK, I think the last slide is. Can you go ahead? Yeah, OK, that's just our contact information and I wanted to thank everybody here as well as the New Zealand MFAT for their contributions, um, to, to our work in this field. Thank you. Thank you, Katie. Thank you very much for taking us a little deeper into the practicalities of measurement and also indicating the kind of processes and systems that countries have to have in place to be able to participate in carbon markets and access climate finance as a longer term objective. As for the previous presentation, we now have a quick poll and we perhaps take a short minute to do that as well. Again, if you could please. Take out your phone, scan the QR code, and again, just same task here, write down one or two things that stood out from Katie's presentation. As we prepare for the 3rd and last presentation, then go into breakout group discussions. Again, don't be shy and we appreciate you being forthcoming with your reflections. This is a learning event and meant to help you internalize some of the technical knowledge that's being conveyed here. And it also helps us to engage with you virtually and design future events that are perhaps more tailored to your specific interests and needs. Um, so Katie, you've been very systematic, which is a great thing. So we started with a very global perspective and Andrea's presentation, and Katie, you broke down what it means in practice to do the measurement part in particular and go through that process of moving up the letter of the tiers from tier 1 to tier 2 and tier 3. It was also great to see how different countries across the region compare. Um, costs are being mentioned here in some of the comments, and of course that's something you alluded to as well. Costs to play a factor and certain capacities need to place to implement these these methods, including running models and sampling the fields, etc. Um, someone noted that it's still a long way to go and really also one of the objectives that we want to have with this session is for participants to have a sense of what the roadmap is from the place where they find themselves now and where they might want to find themselves a few years down the road where climate finance could be leveraged through emissions rise and using MRV as the mechanism or the tool to achieve that. OK, so some people are surprised the costs and perhaps in the moment when we go into Vietnam's presentation will control down further into the specific costs applicable to Vietnam. Now, having said that again, um friends of next generation rise, please continue posting your comments here. It's very interesting how you're reacting to these presentations. We're taking note of that. And if our next three presenters could be ready for their presentation, as I said, we have a 3rd presentation. Also scope to be about 15 minutes, running a few minutes behind, but I think we'll make that up as we transition into the breakout groups later on. Let me briefly introduce the present presenters for the next presentation. Uh, it's a, it's a trio of, um, um, of presenters who will share the 50 minutes that they have. The first presenter is, uh, my colleague Tong, who's a climate finance specialist in the climate group at the World Bank Group, um, along with, uh, Zhuo Cheng, who is a senior climate finance specialist based in Singapore, also with the World Bank Group. And Dr. Cheng, who's director for the Institute of Agriculture and Environment, an organization, a research organization in Vietnam that advises the government and has been very deeply involved in the system that is being developed in Vietnam or what is called Vietnam's 1 million hectare high quality low emissions right program, and you heard high quality or high integrity earlier in Katie's Andrea's presentation. So the quality and the transparency and the rigor associated with measurements of emissions and emissions reductions. It is absolutely critical to access climate finance. So with that very brief introduction, um, over to you Tong as the first of the three presenters. I appreciate you being on time, but taking us one step further and down into Vietnam and it's specifically the Lower Mekong Delta and show us, showcase how the work has been progressing there. Over to you Tong. Yeah. Thank, thanks, Alex. Uh, good morning, good evening, everyone. Uh, my name is Ts and uh today together with um Mr. Qing from Institute of Agricultural and Environment and my colleague Chuo, will walk you through how a country can actually apply all the theory that you have been hearing from, uh, Andrea and Katie. In practice. And in this case would be Vietnam 1 million high quality, low carbon rice. So just before we go into the details, uh, a bit of like also sharing a background. This is a government led program focusing in Mekong Delta. So 90% of the Vietnam rice export come from Mekong Delta. So the content of like today, uh, we'll walk you through through three aspects. One is the technical design of the the uh the national MRB framework proposed here that is aligned with the carbon market standard. And the process, how does the government come up like with this design, as well as experience so far from the demonstrations uh side and the pis. Next slide, please. OK. So, uh, so may maybe some of this you have been hearing from, from, from Andrea and Katie already, but, uh, before, before we start working in all of this, we want to understand, uh, what are the requirements from the carbon markets because the aim is to having all of these go to the carbon market. Market. Uh, and this is really worth it to note that this is large scale projects. So, even though that there's so many methodologies out there that Katie have shared with you, uh, in the slides, but we, we actually see that there's a common requirement across all this methodology they share. There are 4 elements that we pick it up from there. You see on the left box sizes, certification, digital water monitoring, uh, fuel emission factors, and modeling. So it's a bit of quickly on what does it mean. Uh, on certification, it means like, so each of, like you cannot treat the whole million hectare as one single field and then calculate it one time. Each of the few have different emission patterns because of their soil type, or because of their water management practice, uh, farming practice. So that's why it's important to break down of this group and, and then categorizing in different groups that share the similar emission patterns. The calculation is then done for each of these groups. Digital water monitorings, uh, as you hear also is, so in the past, relies on the uh paper farmer logbook, which is cheaper, but obviously it, it, it, it's, it's not really a reliable. So nowadays, the cover market buyer would expect some form of like digital evidence uh that can, can be verified. This can be censored, it can be other type of method. And then the few emission factors, um, uh, you can also hear. Earlier about the tier tier part, which is basically, it talks about like local conditions. So the emission factor per hectare and the rise in Vietnam is different in China is different on Bangladesh, uh, India, Thailand. So that's why it's important that not using the global default factor, but to understand the emissions emission factor of local condition in each of the country. For large scale project for carbon, it has to be at least a tier 2 national subnational emission factor or doing the closed chamber on the field that, that Katie shared with you. Uh, the last one is modelings and as, as, as also been also introduced, um, it is, it's accurate, but it requires a lot of data to start with. So that's all the requirement from the market. And how then we move to the case of Vietnam. How, how do we start with all of this? That's when the reality hit us with most of the existing rice carbon projects globally, previously under the Kyoto Protocol is, is mostly in small scale, which is already a roughly between 7000 to 15,000 hectare. The issue now is if we we follow all of this Requirements for the large scale projects at a high level of data accuracy, and it's super costly. The MRV is so super costly, making the whole model of selling carbon credit from rice not viable anymore because it's involve a lot of smallholder farmers. Why is it costly? Because the more heterogeneous the landscape becomes, the more groups we have for monitoring, hence the cost increasing. Uh, lucky for us, Vietnam's, uh, uh, doesn't start from scratch. So Vietnam already adopt a tier two subregional and seasonal emission factor, which is like kind of suitable and accepted by the market for large scale. The country has a like a past decade experience AWD which leads to one of the advantages, they have a strong cooperative infrastructures and culture. Why it is important? Because it actually many of the farmer and the cooperative, they follow the same common irrigation schedule, common crop calendar, which enabled the collective uh monitoring effort instead of relying on the individual farmer. Next slide, please. So, after that is the context, uh, we start moving to, OK, with all the method right now, which method are like most feasible to be scale up to 1 million hectare instead of the small scale. So all the methods, um, you, you, you see pros and cons that Katie just shared with you. We tested as well and then we tested uh from you see on the slide it's like 5 method in water monitoring. So there's a traditional pipe, uh, but then with using mobile photo app by the farmer, business or digital, uh, using the pipe but mobile app by the cooperatives, water sensors, data light and modelings. So, um, what the conclusion from all this is all the methods had pros and cons, as Katie confirmed the, confirmed what Katie Shelley. Earlier, the pipe of mobile app by the farmers, it is low cost, but then it's required a lot of efforts by the farmer to go to the field with to different time during the season. So it's a lot of manual effort. And not all the farmers actually have smartphone. Many of the farmers in Vietnam are like very old. They are, and then they, they do not have, they like do not know how to upload the. Photo as well. So there's some limitation. So we test, OK, maybe more app, but not by the farmer, let's by the cooperative holder that look like. So it shows some potential for scale, but then it, it actually requires some detailed mapping on the water level uniformity across area to reduce accuracy inaccuracy of the data. The water sensor, what we learned is expensive, it's accurate, less labor effort, but at the same time, it actually gets easily be stolen as well as easily be damaged after 1 or 2 years. Uh, satellites is expensive, it's upgraded to large scale, but, um, but it shows some technical challenges can share as well. And that the government also do have. Some concerns over the data access into such a big landscape for, for who, who can get access to all this private sector company, third party, how do we how do we manage all of this? And last but not least, the model modeling one. The issue with modeling is, is, is accurate, but not everyone has enough data to start right away. The conclusion is no single method actually can resolve all the constraint. Every method is like there's some, some limitation between data quality, cost, feasibility. So, after multiple uh multiple consultation, the conclusion for like Vietnam is a phase and combined method is needed. Next slide, please. OK, what are the phase method of phase approach? So the phase approach is, let's start with um phase one, which is whatever is utilizing whatever the country is having. Basically, it's utilizing Vietnam's existing tier two sub-regional seasonal emission factor, and then do the certification to understand the landscape of the, of the emissions uh profiled in the 1 million hectare. And And from that conduct direct measurements also to strengthen the emission factor across the strata, do the digital monitorings, but not uh with individual farmers through cooperatives. So, this approach is aligned with carbon market standards, as well as it aligned with the country national in uh greenhouse gas inventory as well. Throughout the times, there are a couple of first beginnings year when the carbon finance and, and money. Start flowing. So all this data can be featured in into the phase two, which is the tier 3 process-based model modeling which offer more uh accuracy of the data and then later on reduce efforts to ongoing annually measurement on the field. So, by doing all of this, it, it provides different benefits to the country. Um, maybe the first benefit we're talking about here is carbon finance, but it's actually to. Vietnam, it it it is not the only benefit. The first one is actually low emission rice branding. So you probably have heard the story of one of the export company in Vietnam successfully sold rice to Japan's market as a high premium price for the branding, low emission rice branding. The roughly $800 usually is $600 to $700. There's a second benefit is obviously improving the country NEC reporting. Third benefit is the domestic carbon market. It's not only international, domestic carbon market is the government establishing emission trading scheme. This is the credit fund rice sector can also offer into high emitting companies and, and enterprise in the country. And last but not least, of course, is the enabling the private sector to access more accurate data to, to uh, go to the carbon finance. So with that, I would hand over to my colleague Zhuo to talk to you through the process. How does the government come up with these side of things. Thanks, Tom. Uh, next slide, please. Hi, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, uh, everyone. Um, so I, I want to take one step back, uh, just to remind us, uh, MRV is basically a mean to monitoring, reporting, and verifying the mitigation results. But without a sustainable Operations of the technical interventions. No matter how we build and strengthen the MRV capacity, we won't be able to get the mitigation results. So in Vietnam's case, actually the MRV we customized for the 1 million hectarerice program has been built upon decades of efforts. Um, so in this list, basically you can see from the World Bank side, we had two back to back lending operations in Vietnam since 2008. Uh, which gradually, uh, bring brought Vietnam to be confident and capable to, um, introduce a low carbon rise, uh, technicians in a large scale. So, um, because I think some of the audience, you may not come from the carbon market background, more from the government or sector practice, so I just want to Um, emphasizing the importance of the existing sector context and the capacity, which will serve as a foundation to customize the MRV approach, uh, for each of the countries or each of the program. So build upon these two back to back World Bank lending projects, actually, the government come up with the idea, they want to scale up from 120,000 hectare, 1 mast 5 reduction technology pilot to 1 million hectare. And from that side, the bank decided, the World Bank offered a combined uh technical and finance support package, including lending um lending support for the infrastructure needed to promote. Uh, those low carbon, uh, rice technicians, um, technologies as a basis for the sustainable operation of the, um, um, technologies and also using carbon as a result-based incentive to award the, uh, actual results to be achieved and to be verified. So basically, going back, um, I mean, taking out of the MRV, the overall background is Vietnam has been Building its capacity in promoting sustainable low carbon, high quality rice cultivation in the past one decade. From the World Bank side, we also upgraded our support to the country to really address their needs given what they have been achieved, what they are facing to scale up. Uh, in terms of the challenges and opportunities. Uh, I also want to emphasize MRV is only one segment, um, of the technical preparation work for monetization, generation of the high integrity rise carbon credits. So, um, as one of the package, we also offer several other um uh preparation and readiness support to the country in order to make the carbon finance transaction um become real. So next slide please. So in this slides, basically, uh I want to walk you through just in a very general way like how this MRV, this carbon market grid MRV has been processed in Vietnam. This is the one owned by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Economy and this will be the fundamental MRV system to be integrated in the 1 million hectare rise design and implementation arrangement. So government has to accept it and be able to really implement it and um and be able to continue using it. So that's why during the design phase, actually, as Tong just explained, we together with the government and the think tanks in the country, we compiled what are the carbon market requirements existed for this sector and what are the existing MRV um data and practice Vietnam already has because country already has done several MRV. Work in different locations using different funding resources together with different partners. So we, we did a very um solid reality check uh before we kick off the design of the MRV because we don't want to do anything um brand new. We want to build upon what Vietnam has been done and has been delivered already. You ready to use minimum efforts to generate this MRV results. And also, um, as part of the domestic process, we organized from World Bank, World Bank side, we supported two national consultation workshops, but I, I, my understanding is actually the ministry has organized much more than these two in order to really motivate uh provinces who are going to participate in this 1 million program and who are, who are going to be the entity to lead the implementation of the MRV. Uh, to really share their experience, concerns, uh, and also to organize themselves to come to the consensus about what can be done and how this can, can be delivered. Also, we realized, um, because, because of the lack of the common practice for the large scale rise MRV accepted by the carbon market players, the more we can hear from international stakeholders about the design of the Vietnam MRV, the more confidence we can help, we will have to help Vietnam to outreach carbon market buyers in the future. So, together with the ministry, we actually organized an international consultation workshop, um, and also not a workshop, a consultation for two months, basically to uh collect the feedback from carbon market standard um makers and also some of the private and public entities. Cities who have been working in Vietnam on MRV in the recent 2 or 3 years just to get their feedback, how do they think this MRV package is aligned with international carbon market principles and from their point of view, whether this phased and combined MRV approach can eventually help Vietnam to leverage carbon finance support in a more, in a more optimized way and set the precedents for the other country to replicate. So, also we did lots of interview and the data uh reality check to make sure we can balance the MRV cost and the data accuracy requirements. I saw in the previous um question chat that some er participants raised the question about the MRV cost. This is something we have been testing and I think we have some very basic idea like where and how to lower the MRV cost without sacrificing the data accuracy, um. Results. So, after this, um, I think this design stage actually has been, we went this design stage took us 2.5 years. Now we are in the implementation preparation stage for the MRV for this carbon market grade MRV. Basically, in the Dr. Qin from IAE will walk you through how this MRV 11 pilot has been carried now um and also uh from the government side, they're preparing their domestic process to issue this MRV methodology and implementation plan as a national technical guidelines uh in order to institute institutionalize the MRV implementation in their domestic system. So this is where we are now. Um, thanks a lot. So Doctor Chen, over to you. And give it to and zoo, uh, next slice, please. Yeah, you know, um, IPCC always, uh, recommended we come up from, uh, tier number 1 and to tier 2 and tier 3. And Vietnam already, uh, developed a tier 2 for rice, uh, in, uh, uh, different zone is the north, the center and the south. But you know that the Mekong River and I have 2, nearly 2 million hectares of, um, of rice, uh, and it covers so many subregions, soy Thai and other conditions. So we, by overlaying a different, um, biophysic map, uh, for example, subregion, we have 4 subregion. We have 3 soy Thai, and then we generate the groshing operation and we get, Many combination of the subregion and soy Thai to make strata. Um, removing some, uh, strata that's not suitable to AWD, for example, the heavy sallied soil or very, um, water logging, and then we get, um, 10 major homogeneous strata and identify across the region. It also same, um, same time that we developed, uh, 11, um, demonstration and 50 hectare each demonstration of high quality and low emission rise over the, the dents representative for, for 10 strata because, 11 strata have a double, uh, demonstration. So we, uh, also following, uh, principle of the MRV guidelines, for example, uh, 3 main steps is the first step we do the, um, the fin survey, the mapping to generate the, the cooperative, uh, area and spot, um, to identify the detained strata and spot. Spot here, we define that is a group of fin of uh of the farmers that have a similar condition of the fin with sharing the elevation, soil type, irrigation system, and then, uh, that is the basic for monitoring unit of the corporation. So the step two, after delineating the, uh, the, the, the map and spot map, we collect the baseline data and establish the mortality point and also calculate the baseline emission. Uh, uh, step 3, we, um, Train the cooperative, uh, to how to monitor, how to report, and, uh, how to collect, uh, data for QATC. Um, in the picture, you can see that the, the example of the spot map that the, the cooperative of long cooperative, they have, uh, 50.2 hectares, but they have 40 households. In principle, we, uh, if we do, uh, monitoring for all households, we have to monitoring for 41. Uh, Points, but, uh, if we group in sport, we have only 5 spots, and then within the 5 spots, uh, everything has the same condition, then we just only monitor for 5 spots only. So we reduce a lot of um of resource of human capacity and and and also the budget. Next night, please. Nice, nice. Um, here, a sample of a spot map. Um, we have a, here, we have a 3 cooperative, and they have a 3 map, uh, with different distribution of the fin. You can see that if the, uh, the fin is concentrated together and we, and we can easily group, uh, the fin with a similar, uh, biophysic condition. But if the Finn is very smart-minded and, uh, uh, located far away from each other, and then it's difficult to, to go, to combine and to group it, and then number of spot will be more, and then we have, we, we have a, uh, spend a lot of money for, and also a lot of equipment for the measurement and reporting nest place. Yeah, um, uh, I'll go through all the, uh, MRV activities and demonstration, we, uh, have, uh, some, uh, lesson learned, uh, emerging, uh, uh, the first one is we need to prioritize to reduce, uh, um, for the areas of. So we, we need to select, um, the, when we select the areas of implementation, we need to, uh, prioritize for the fin, uh, located close to each other so we can reduce a lot of, uh, thing, uh, for example, reducing your labor, reduce the cost of MRV fin activity, irrigation genesis, uh, reduce data variability, uh, across, uh, monitoring points. Um, the second thing we also need to prioritize for homogeneous, uh, the flat areas, because this one, we can have, uh, we can reduce a number of spots, and then we can reduce, um, a lot of, uh, uh, facility and resource for monitoring. The, the third one is we need to, um, Uh, combine and to enter the monitoring in the existing institution because we, we can arrange to reduce farmer burden and improve the data consistency. Uh, next one, we can align, uh, size selection and, uh, with the stratification. So this one is also, um, we, uh, because the, the stratification is representative and also giving the emission, emission efficiency, um, for, for the whole, uh, strata, so we can, uh, uh, use that one for calculation for the next, uh, the next step. Uh, and the next one is we need to build on the existing domestic data system because we know that we have many sources of data and we can combine them to, to make an integrated uh database, otherwise. And also it needs to be agreed between the different source, uh, because, uh, for example, cop production department, they manage, uh, exporting and manage the production, they manage the emission, and, uh, and also the, uh, carbon credit, uh, so all data should be agreed and should be in line, uh, for the good management. And the last one, Dr. Thing, I, I, I know you're approaching the end of the, um the presentation. I just wanted to give you a quick time cube so we can transition into the discussion in a moment. Thank you, but wrap up, please. OK. Yeah, um, uh, after finishing this 11 demonstration, we estimated the GG emission reduction here is average from, uh, 3.7 to 4.6% per, uh, CO2 equivalent per hectare per season. Um, if we, it also very depends on, uh, uh, what we select the the, the fin. If the fin have a baseline. Uh, already implemented, uh, mid-season drainage or AWB, so the reduction will be less, less bliss. I think this was the last slide. I believe that um come on, yeah, thank you very much for listening. Thank you very much, and, and this gets us to the end of the 3rd presentation. Thank you for all the presenters to taking us into the details and into the weeds of MRV for low emissions rise, and uh thank you for the last set of 3. we won't have a poll after this presentation as we'll now go into breakout groups just to highlight, as the three last presenters, they really took us down into the rice fields of the lower Meikong Delta. You also saw the effort and time it takes to get to a point where a country can start considering transacting with carbon markets. And the importance of the quality. You also saw the importance of having the right partners gathered around that process, the World Bank being one of them, being another. We will now transition into the breakout groups. We had initially allocated 25 minutes for that. Perhaps we can shorten that to 15 minutes. So we have a bit of time at the end to break to report back into plenary. What we will now do is and you can perhaps show the the next slide, Martin. Will break out into a handful of 6 breakout groups have facilitators and rapporteurs for each. You see their names here that includes the presenters who delivered a presentation this morning, but I also quickly like to introduce two additional facilitators for these breakout groups. One of them is Anya Albrecht from the GRC, the German technical Corporation, and she's a manager for a project focusing on very similar questions. In the South Asia and India region. So she'll be facilitating one of the groups, and you can perhaps learn a bit more about that work. And another one is Nkuluma Sing Singheri from the World Bank Group, also senior climate finance specialist who's very knowledgeable both in the topic, but also familiar with the East Asia region. And corresponding to each of those group facilitators, you have rapporteurs shown on the slide here who will be taking copious notes of the discussion you will have in a moment. Uh, you will, and we hope you can entertain very briefly, 3 quick questions. Um, again, as I mentioned at the beginning of the session, I hope that the country participants felt inspired by how things work, especially in the context of Vietnam, and you can perhaps report back your ideas and takeaway messages in a moment in the plenary. But here are three questions these facilitators hope to take into the virtual rooms in a moment. The first one has to do with, you know, what, um, what are your impressions? What are your takeaways? The second one has to do, how does it inform your ambitions to leverage low emissions rising production in your country to attract investments, climate finance, or excess carbon markets. And the third one, perhaps you could focus on Vietnam specific experience, and you were just presented a fair amount of technical detail. How many of these questions were addressed and sorted out through a multi-stakeholder process. So these are the three questions that we hope you can take into the breakout groups. Let's aim for 15 minutes or so, so that we have 10 minutes to hear back. In addition to the discussion during the breakout groups participants, you can also scan this QR code. This gives you an opportunity just to type in your ideas, your comments, your suggestions, your reflections, the actions that you're taking away. And we'll record that and use that to inform our subsequent series of webinars, but hopefully you can use now the next 15 minutes to discuss actively and and report back in a moment. So Tanya, who has been active behind the scenes, will now bin you all into these groups just to say that the ones who require Chinese translation will stay in this virtual room. Everyone else will find themselves in a virtual room. Uh, together with these rapporteurs and experts, and I wish you a very successful discussion and we'll see you back here in about 15 minutes or so. Friends of Next Generation rise, welcome back to the plenary. Um, it looks like we'll have to make some improvements for the next webinar to bring everyone into the breakout groups, and I, I need to be more German about the timekeeping, uh, next time, um, but we just simply had too much interesting information be presented by Andrea, by Katie. And the team from Vietnam, and it was really hard to not listen to all the important lessons and insights that you shared. But as we said at the beginning, also in the opening remarks by Lorraine and Marianne, this is meant to be the beginning of a process. Um, we wanted to listen to you, hear from you, uh, we hopefully gathered a fair bit of information through your comments and the quick discussion that you had just now. To understand where your interests and your preferences are so we can tailor a future event a bit more closely to where that is. This is also the beginning of building a community of practice and bringing people together. We saw some of each other's faces throughout the session and perhaps that's beginning of some partnership and collaboration. Many of you know each other already, and that could be fostered. So again, this is the beginning of a process just to state that the few moments that I tune into some of the breakout groups, we started to have a good discussion. We heard from other countries who were not presenting today, and it seems like there's a lot of interesting insights to be shared, perhaps at the later stage from other countries and on specific technologies. So in Interest of time and given that many of you spend our evening hours in some cases very early morning hours with us, we're not going to have a report back, but we'll check in with all the rapporteurs and the people in the group to to capture the key ideas, and we'll make some improvements next time when we have an event like this to get more leverage out of the breakout session. But just to acknowledge that we had several partners obviously present, but also join the breakout groups that was the plan and you start to discuss some of the findings from GIZs works, for instance, in, in India, and we can foster that going forward. Um, again, the ideas of these three questions was really to stimulate, to think about what you learned, what you take away, and what kind of actions you you want to take. Uh, the, the name of the program is Scaling Next Generation Rice, and you heard a lot about scale the last presentation and really saw how you took how the Vietnam partners took something from, from the field, from the muddy rice fields up to the lower Mekong Delta and linked that to national reporting and And really use technologies in a smart way to cover large areas. The name of the program is 1 million hectares. So that's sort of the kind of impact and scale countries hope to achieve and, and, and partners, including the World Bank can hopefully help achieve that through technical assistance, knowledge, and, and finance. So having said that, um, again, thank you very much for all your contributions, um, for your listening, maybe more listening today than contribution, but We'll make sure that this is the the the seat of a partnership and some exchange going forward. Before we close, we have one more task for you, which is to scan again. Martin, right? another QR code, which is a short evaluation and it's not just evaluation of the quality of the events, but also This is a bit for us to get a bit more information from you, what you like, what do you take away from it, what you might want to hear more of. So do take um a minute or two. Uh, to scan that code and type in that, and again we'll, we'll capture that through the platform here, so we can be better tailored and as effective as possible next time we connect with you, and as we go this. Next gen rise family, um, Martin, anything else to say on the evaluation as we encourage people to pull out the phones one last time to scan that code? Yes, I think, yes, I think that's, uh, that's good. Uh, we could also, uh, Marketa, if you haven't already, please post a link in the chat as well. Um, uh, but please, uh, just use your phone. These are very short questions, uh, 3 questions that I would like your feedback on. And, uh, uh, you know, so it will inform, uh, especially what we would like you to share, um, in addition to, uh, commenting on the delivery and the content of the session is for you to, uh, propose any, uh, you know, topics that you would like to focus on in this series of webinars. We appreciate your suggestions there as well. Uh. So I can, I cannot see the comments that are coming in, uh, but I suppose they are coming in. Um, Martin, I'm sure if you see that, but trusting that the technology works and we're collecting your feedback again, uh, please do take a minute to, um, to share your thoughts, your takeaway messages, and we will follow up with information about the platform that that Lorraine introduced at the beginning of the session. And there's a platform that will be a glowing repository of knowledge and resources, including the recording of this webinar, so we will follow up with that. So for those of you who want to relive the moment or share the moment with others, they will be recording at some point along with with resources, and again, we'll use this platform to start growing that community and use that as a way to foster peer to peer learning, which is what we attempted to do with the with the breakout groups. Um, Martin, I trust that we're getting information in. So, OK, great, excellent. Thank you very much. So we're 1 minute past the hour. We started at 1 minute past the hour, so we got a full 2 hours' worth of attention from you. I hope you found it. Enriching, enlightening, uh, insightful. I'd like to again thank you. I thank the participants and presenters in particular very much to spend your evening hours and in some cases, ungodly early morning hours with with us. Thank you, Andrea, um, to New Zealand, 18 hours from where I am. To Dr. Cheng in Tokyo, uh, 14 hours from here, the many participants in, in, uh, Asia, including Vietnam, um, um, and Katie, thank you very much for joining from there. Participants across the South and Southeast Asia region, and I hope you got something out of this and we'll be in touch. Um, many of you are partners and colleagues with our country-based task team leaders of the World Bank, who will also be first contact points for any follow up in addition to the colleagues who were connected here and hosted this seminar. So with that, um, again, a great thank you to East from here and we will be in touch very soon. And before I do that, one last check with Martin if I forgot anything important to say on Logistics and next steps. Yeah, maybe just to mention that uh we will have, we, we have a series of webinars planned and, uh, on technology, uh, going deeper on that and uh other aspects of, uh, uh, of, of, of the, of the webinar series. Uh, so please, uh, uh, stay tuned for that and also from what you suggest in the evaluation. We will incorporate your ideas in, uh, future sessions. Uh, so looking forward to collaborating, uh, more with you. Those of you who have registered on the, on the collaboration, the Connect for Impact uh platform, uh, uh, the, the, the link that was, uh, shared has, uh, in the chat has all the information. That you need, we, we look forward to collaborating, uh, uh, on the platform. We'll post these resources there as well, so, and, uh, you can, uh, you'll be guided in how to start discussions and, uh, uh, on, on various, uh, uh, aspects, uh, and, and collaborate, uh, more moving forward. Thank you very much again. So this is just an appetizer. It was a grain of rice and hopefully a few years down the road, we have a bowl of rice of knowledge and a family to share it with. So thank you very much and see you soon. Bye. Thank you. Goodbye. Thank you so much. Bye bye.

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SNGR MRV Webinar Recording Feb.25.2026

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This recording features the inaugural webinar of the Measuring Matters: Sustainable Pathways for Next Generation Rice series, held on February 25, 2026, as part of the World Bank Group’s Scaling Next Generation Rice Impact Program.

The session explores how robust, science‑based measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems enable countries, jurisdictions, and projects to quantify emissions reductions from climate‑smart rice production and access both compliance and voluntary carbon markets. Drawing on insights from international experts and pilot MRV initiatives in South and Southeast Asia, the webinar highlights agricultural GHG accounting as the foundation for transparent, scalable MRV systems that can unlock climate finance and incentives for low‑emission rice.

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