Where Are The Updated NDCs?

By Paul Homewood

https://www.climatewatchdata.org/ndc-tracker

The Paris Agreement requires countries to submit new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) every five years, reflecting progressively higher ambition and taking into account each country’s capacity.

With COP30 just months away, all of the 197 countries that belong to the United Nations were supposed to have submitted updated national climate plans to the UN by February this year. These plans outline how each country will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 in line with the Paris Agreement.

But as the ClimateWatch map shows above, only 27 countries, accounting for only 21% of global emissions have bothered to do so.

Worse still for those bothered about such things, one of the 27 is the US, who submitted its plan before Trump took office and promptly withdrew from Paris! I think we can safely assume their NDC is now in the bin.

Inevitably the UK heads the list of lemmings. And as Climate Action Tracker explain, many of the new NDCs represent lower ambitions, not higher. They comment about Brazil, for instance:

Brazil submitted a target to reduce emissions between 59–67% below 2005 levels by 2035. Assessing the ambition of this target has been difficult due to the lack of transparency on how much the land sector sink will contribute to the target, given the country’s need for urgent reductions in the energy sector.

This results in an extraordinarily wide range of estimated emissions from all other sectors (excl. LULUCF) that are consistent with the NDC target. The lack of transparency is a clear issue for climate integrity – the public and the scientific community need to be able to understand what a government is proposing to do and in the present situation, Brazil’s NDC provides no clarity on this. We conclude that Brazil’s 2035 NDC target is not 1.5°C compatible.

Canada too are fudging their targets:

Canada’s 2035 NDC sets a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45–50% below 2005 levels by 2035. However, this target is based on a ‘gross-net’ approach, where reductions from the land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector are counted towards achievement, even though LULUCF is excluded from the baseline. This approach reduces the pressure to achieve real reductions in fossil fuel emissions and introduces uncertainty into the stringency of the target.

Indeed, according to them, the UK is the only bright spot!

Even the EU, it seems, is haggling over whether to allow the purchase of international carbon credits to offset emissions.

It goes without saying that there are no updated NDCs from China, India or any of the other major emitting developing Asian nations.