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Capacity building support by means of international development projects for developing countries to prepare national reporting under the Paris Agreement has taken on increasing importance. Given that support for capacity building has been provided for more than two decades, the aim of our research is to assess past trends in capacity building support for national GHG inventories, and to discuss major lessons learned for this kind of support in the future. We reviewed project documentation of GHG inventory capacity building projects for the last 20 years in Viet Nam and Cambodia. These two countries each represent unique patterns in GHG inventory capacity development in Asia. We analyzed both the financial scale and activities of these projects and identified the following key lessons: (1) capacity building support was accelerated after biennial update reports became an additional submission requirement; (2) more capacity building support tended to be provided to Viet Nam, a country with higher existing capacity, than to Cambodia, a country with greater needs; (3) Viet Nam had more access to institutional capacity building support; and (4) there were relatively limited experiences of capacity building approaches for the country in more need. Our suggested way forward includes setting up a simple but common monitoring system at the global level, and advancing evaluation research at the project level so as to achieve more effective capacity building support. • Support was accelerated after the emergence of biennial update reports in 2011. • More support was provided to Viet Nam, a country with higher capacity. • Viet Nam had more access to institutional capacity building. • Limited experiences of capacity building approaches for the country in more need. • A global monitoring system and evaluation research of projects is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]