Full title: Horizon Europe – REIGN-MP (Resilient and Effective International Governance and Networks for monitoring gases relevant to the Montreal Protocol).

REIGN-MP is working to make global monitoring of gases controlled under the Montreal Protocol more coordinated, reliable and effective. We are exploring how information is collected, shared and used in international decision-making, identifying where improvements are needed, and helping to build a system that works fairly and effectively for countries around the world.

Strengthen international structures governing the monitoring of substances controlled under the Montreal Protocol and related agreements to enable a transition from a fragmented, case-by-case approach to a globally coordinated, equitable, resilient, and scalable system.

The Montreal Protocol’s control-measure and compliance system depends on a data pipeline: national reporters submit Article 7 data to the Ozone Secretariat and parallel data (i.e. other non-governmental data inputs) to the Multilateral Fund Secretariat, the Implementation Committee reviews it for compliance, and the Meeting of the Parties (MOP) uses it to negotiate control measures and funding decisions.

Two things are rarely evaluated together: whether the reporting process itself performs well (timeliness, completeness, accuracy), and whether the resulting data shapes MOP outcomes, versus sitting unused in an archive. Task 1.1 is designed to answer both, and is organised into three components run as parallel and sequenced sub-tasks:

• Sub-task 1.1.1 (Track A) – Process Effectiveness: assessing how well the Article 7 / Multilateral Fund reporting pipeline performs. To be clear, this is not about the efficacy of the data production process but about how well data is conveyed across the reporting chain.
• Sub-task 1.1.2 (Track B) – Political Utilization: assessing how much reported data is actually cited, deliberated, or acted on within MOP and Implementation Committee processes, and the role of other scientific or knowledge inputs in political proceedings.
• Sub-task 1.1.3 – Stakeholder Engagement and Workshop: convening key informants and political actors to validate findings from Tracks A and B and to gather input on improved modalities for integrating data into MOP political decision-making.

The aim across all three sub-tasks is to identify the gap, if any, between reporting effort and political use, and to recommend how REIGN can focus its activities in latter stages of the project, including the balance between improving the pipeline itself, and/or improving how existing data is surfaced to decisionmakers.

Link image: Panoramic view of Kigali, photo by Ana Kenk via Pexels.