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PBL Climate Pledge NDC tool

The Paris Agreement aims to limit global mean temperature increase to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it to below 1.5 °C. To achieve this, more than 190 Parties have submitted Nationally Determined Contributions, so-called NDCs, outlining their climate action beyond 2020. By 1 February 2024, 178 countries (including the EU and its 27 EU Member States), representing about 94% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, had communicated new or updated NDCs. The PBL Climate Pledge NDC tool shows the targets in these NDCs (also including the updates) and the pledges made earlier for 2020. For 25 major emitting Parties, the tool compares these targets with greenhouse gas emission projections under current domestic climate policies up to 2030.

Results: NDC emission targets and the impact of policies

Global

Share of global emissions in 2019: 100%

Source: PBL, 2024

Main general findings

The figure shows the impact of projected aggregated emission reductions resulting from the full implementation of most unconditional and conditional NDCs submitted to date, compared to the business-as-usual and current policy scenarios, and the least-cost 2 °C and 1.5 °C scenarios. The main findings are:

  • Almost all of the 25 Parties analysed have climate policies in place that reduce emissions, but for 12 of these Parties, reductions fall short of the reduction targets in their current NDCs.
  • However, the projected emission levels from current climate policies have decreased by about 2 GtCO2e by 2030 compared to the previous update in 2022, mainly due to the influence of new ambitious policies adopted in the US (Inflation Reduction Act), the EU27 (Fit-for-55 and REPowerEU), Canada and Japan.
  • The NDC updates − conditional and unconditional − have an aggregated impact on global GHG emissions by 2030 of about -4.6 and -4.7 GtCO2e respectively, compared to the first round of NDCs, which reduces the 2030 emissions gap for 2oC with about 25%, and for 1.5 °C with 20%. This change is about 0.5 GtCO2e lower in 2020 than the previous update mainly due to more enhanced NDCs from Brazil and Türkiye and a lower NDC projection from China.
  • Seven G20 economies with new or updated NDCs have pledged stronger GHG reduction targets, leading to additional reductions of the aggregated emissions of about 3.1 GtCO2e by 2030 compared to the original NDCs, which represent 75-85% of the aggregated global reduction. The largest contribution of the seven G20 economies come from the US, the EU27, Japan, China, the UK, Argentina and Canada.
  • However, the emission reductions resulting from the NDCs will still be insufficient to put the world on a cost-effective pathway to keeping global temperature increase below 2 °C. Implementation of the unconditional and conditional NDCs would still leave an emission gap of 14 and 12 GtCO2e, respectively, to securing this likely chance.
  • For limiting temperature increase to 1.5 °C, the gap is about 8 GtCO2e larger for both NDC scenarios, i.e. the unconditional and conditional NDC scenario. The required emission level by 2030 is determined by assuming a cost-optimal global reduction pathway from 2023 onwards.

The gap is so large that governments, the private sector and local communities need to make their climate pledges more ambitious and focus on early and more stringent mitigation action. However, some countries, regions, cities and businesses have promised or implemented urgently needed climate action (Höhne et al., 2020). Closing the gap will require scaling up these few success stories and mirroring them with progress in every sector.

Progress of countries towards achieving their NDCs

The report by Nascimento et al. (2023) provides an overview of projected greenhouse gas emissions, for 25 major emitting countries/regions (map below ) up to 2030, taking into account the emission trajectories based on current policies and the implementation of NDCs. Current policy trajectories reflect all adopted and implemented policies, defined here as legislative decisions, executive orders, or their equivalent. This excludes publicly announced plans or strategies, while individual policies to implement such plans or strategies would qualify. The main findings of this study are:

Progress made by countries towards achieving their self-imposed 2030 targets of the current NDCs, under current policies.

About 12 out of the 25 major emitting countries still not on track to achieve targets set in their latest NDC targets The analysis takes into account current policy developments and considers the most recent NDC submissions as well as the impact of COVID-19 on GHG emissions. The degree to which the 25 major emitting countries are likely to achieve their latest NDC targets under current policies was found to vary:

  • Of the 25 countries and regions studied here, 13 are likely on track to achieve their self-proclaimed unconditional 2030 NDC targets, with currently implemented policies. These include China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Mexico, Morocco, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Viet Nam, Australia and the EU27.
  • This number is partially due to NDC updates, which are in most cases more ambitious than the original NDCs
  • For some countries, missing the NDC target is a result of increased ambition. This is the case for Argentina, Japan, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. These countries are on track to meet their previous targets but would miss their updated NDCs because they lead to lower emission levels in comparison to the original one.
  • Several of the countries that are on track to meet their targets have NDCs that lead to emissions in 2030 emissions that are substantially higher than their current policies. The NDC targets that are substantially above the current policy scenario in 2030 belong to Viet Nam (24%), Mexico (25%), Türkiye (30%), Iran (32%) and Ethiopia (40%).
  • It should be noted that a country that is likely to meet its NDC does not necessarily undertake a more stringent mitigation action than a country that is not on track. Targets vary in their level of ambition across the countries. A country that is not on track to meet its NDC target may have set a very ambitious target or a country that is on track to meet its NDC target may have set a very ambitious target. Country on track to meet its NDC target may have set a relatively unambitious target. NDCs are also nationally determined and heterogeneous by nature, so a fair comparison of progress between countries is not always straightforward, as countries often have different policy approaches.

NDCs: country classification according to type of target

In advance of the Paris meeting, almost all countries submitted their national post-2020 climate action plans and commitments, as part of their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). Over about 195 countries have ratified the agreement; thus, turning their INDCs into NDCs (recent submissions can be found on the UNFCC website). The following countries have not ratified the Paris Agreement: Eritrea, Libya and Yemen. When developing the tool, we assessed the mitigation components of the NDCs of 144 of these Parties (representing approximately 95% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019).

The mitigation components of the NDCs represent several types of targets, as summarised below (UNEP, 2015):

  • Base year target: economy-wide absolute reduction from historical base year emissions. NDCs report on an absolute reduction from historical base year emissions. The base year chosen varies, with 1990, 2005 and 2010 being the most common.
  • Baseline or BAU target: emission reductions relative to a baseline or business-as-usual projection (specified in the NDCs). The type of emission reduction relative to a baseline or business-as-usual projection has been chosen for many NDCs, mainly for countries located in South America and Central America, Africa and South Asia. The mitigation component of the NDCs specifies the business-as-usual emission projection.
  • Baseline or BAU target (not specified): emission reductions relative to a baseline projection (not specified). Same as under point 2, but here, for the NDCs, baseline or business-as-usual emission projections are not specified, such as for those of the Philippines and Venezuela. For the calculations, we used the baseline projections from national studies (when available) and the PBL business-as-usual projections.
  • Intensity target. China and India aim for emission intensity improvements, a target for non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption/power capacity, and for China, a target year for the peaking of emissions.
  • Intensity and non-GHG target: emission intensity target and non-greenhouse gas target. China and India aim for emission intensity improvements, a target for non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption/power capacity, and for China, a target year for the peaking of emissions.
  • Trajectory and fixed-level target. South Africa has a trajectory target stating the emission ranges for 2030. Several countries, such as Peru and Chile, put forward a fixed-level target, specifying the MtCO2e that they intend not to exceed in a given year.
  • Submitted actions (cannot be quantified). Finally, many countries include mere qualitative descriptions of mitigation actions in their NDCs, or specific targets for sub-sectors, such as for the implementation of renewable energy. As such targets complicate a precise quantification, we have not analysed them here. This group of countries covers about 6% of the global emissions of 2010.

As of February 2024, 178 countries have submitted new NDC targets. Most of these countries have submitted the same type of NDC targets, but there are changes. For example, Saudi Arabia now has a fixed level target, and the Republic of Korea has a reduction target compared to historical base year emissions.

About the tool

The PBL Climate Pledge NDC tool addresses the following three key questions:

  1. What are the countries’ emissions projections for the NDCs for 2030?
  2. Will the projected aggregated impact of the fully implemented NDCs on global emissions, for 2030, be sufficient to achieve the target of staying well below 2 °C / 1.5 °C?
  3. Are countries on track to meet their original NDCs for the period up to 2030?

To address these questions, the tool shows the projected impact of the emission reduction proposals (NDCs) and current policies, per country and globally, on greenhouse gas emissions, up to 2030. This tool analyses the mitigation components of the NDCs of 144 of the 197 Parties (together representing about 95% of emissions in 2019). More specifically, the tool shows the effect of:

  • Pledges: national and global greenhouse gas emission projections for 2020, assuming that pledges will be fully achieved;
  • Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs): national and global greenhouse gas emission projections for 2030, assuming that NDCs will be fully achieved;
  • Current policies: the impact of national climate and energy policies, such as carbon taxation, feed-in tariffs, and standards on emission levels up to 2030 (at least, unless the policy specifies a later end date), for 25 major emitting countries and regions.

The projections show total emissions per country, emissions per capita, and emissions per unit of income. The various indicators provide countries with information on how their contribution compares to those of others.

Methodology

The impact of the most effective current and planned policies on greenhouse gas emissions up to 2030 has been projected by the NewClimate Institute, IIASA and PBL (Nascimento et al., 2023; Den Elzen et al., 2022; 2023). Current and planned policies were selected on the basis of literature research and expert knowledge. Experts involved in the ENGAGE, and ELEVATE projects reviewed the full list of policies, after which a shortlist was compiled of those expected to have the greatest impact on greenhouse gas emissions, for further quantification. The calculations by NewClimate Institute were largely based on its analyses for the Climate Action Tracker project, jointly carried out with Climate Analytics (CAT, 2023). For the calculation, existing scenarios from national and international studies were used, as well as NewClimate Institute’s own calculations of the impact of individual policies in various sub-sectors. PBL based their calculations for the current policies scenarios (all sectors, except land use) on the IMAGE model; IIASA’s projections (the land-use sector only) were based on their global land-use model GLOBIOM and global forest model G4M. Basis of the PBL calculations of the impact of climate policies is the SSP2 baseline (no climate policy), as implemented in the IMAGE model (Van Vuuren et al., 2017; Roelfsema et al., 2020; 2022). Current climate and energy policies in G20 countries, as identified in the ENGAGE, and ELEVATE projects, were added to that baseline. For countries that are part of a larger IMAGE region (Australia, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, and the EU27), emissions projections were downscaled using the country’s share in the region’s 2021 emissions as a constant scaling factor.

Land-use change accounting method: Most of the 25 analysed countries and many of the remaining countries report emission target levels that include CO2 removals from activities related to the land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector. Although there are uncertainties concerning which accounting approaches and methodologies countries will apply to account for LULUCF related emissions and removals, we assume that a majority of countries will apply the net-net accounting approach, so land use emissions are included in the same way as the emissions from the other sectors (see Nascimento et al., 2023).

Quantification of the NDCs is described, in detail, in Den Elzen et al. (2022; 2023), and the quantification of the land-use targets in the NDCs is described, in detail, in Grassi et al. (2017) and Forsell et al. (2016).

Data

The GHG emissions projections were harmonised with historical 1990–2021 emissions. For most Annex I countries, the historical emissions data is based on the Greenhouse Gas Inventories submitted in 2021 to the UNFCCC (UNFCCC, 2023). For many non-Annex I countries, the historical data was taken from the most recent national reports (National Communications and Biennial Update Reports) (UNFCCC, 2021a, UNFCCC, 2021b) (when available). For details for the 25 major emitting countries, see Annex of Nascimento et al., 2023. or the other countries, we use the historical data of the PRIMAP database, in particular the 'country-reported' emissions (Gütschow and Pflüger, 2023). GHG emissions projections under current policies were harmonised to the latest historical emissions data. The harmonisation year was changed to 2021 for Annex I countries and the latest data year for non-Annex I countries.

All GHG emission figures are expressed using the 100-year global warming potentials (GWPs) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. For most countries, emission projections encompass all greenhouse gas emissions, including those from land use, land-use change and forestry.

To calculate the per capita and per GDP indicators, we used the population projections from the UN World Population Prospects 2022 (United Nations, 2022) and the GDP projections from the World Bank (World Bank, 2023) , UNSTAT (The United Nations Statistics Division, 2023) , and the IMF World Economic Outlook (IMF, 2023), supplemented with the projections underlying the IMAGE SSP2 scenario.

Dataset

The emission projections based on the NDCs can be found in Den Elzen et al. (2022) and Nascimento et al. (2023). You can download the data:
den Elzen, M.G.J., Dafnomilis, I., Hooijschuur, E., PBL NDC Factsheets 2024. Zenodo.

Recommended citation

This website needs to be cited as: den Elzen, M.G.J., Dafnomilis, I., Forsell, N., Fragkos, P., Fragkiadakis, K., Höhne, N., Kuramochi, T., Nascimento, L., Roelfsema, M., van Soest, H., and Sperling, F., 2022. Updated nationally determined contributions collectively raise ambition levels but need strengthening further to keep Paris goals within reach. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 27 (6), 33.

Acknowledgements

This study is financed by Directorate-General Climate Action (DG-CLIMA), under contract to DG-CLIMA (No. 090302/2021/854077/SER/CLIMA.C.1/REN ‘Analytical Capacity on International Climate Change Mitigation and Tracking Progress of Action’), and the ELEVATE project, financed by the Directorate General Climate Action (DG CLIMA) and EuropeAid under grant agreement No. 21020701/2017/770447/SER/CLIMA.C.1 EuropeAid/138417/DH/SER/MulitOC (COMMIT). We acknowledge and are grateful for the contributions of, and discussion with, all colleagues of NewClimate Institute and IIASA involved, in particular Detlef van Vuuren (PBL), Hanna Fekete, Niklas Höhne and Takeshi Kuramochi (all NewClimate Institute), and Nicklas Forsell (IIASA), with a special thanks to Allard Warrink (PBL) for all his work on the infographics.

Main publications

  • den Elzen, M.G.J., Dafnomilis, I., Forsell, N., Fragkos, P., Fragkiadakis, K., Höhne, N., Kuramochi, T., Nascimento, L., Roelfsema, M., van Soest, H., and Sperling, F., 2022. Updated nationally determined contributions collectively raise ambition levels but need strengthening further to keep Paris goals within reach. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 27 (6), 33.
  • den Elzen, M.G.J., Dafnomilis, I., Hof, A. F., Olsson, M., Beusen, A., Botzen, W. W., ... & Rogelj, J. (2023). The impact of policy and model uncertainties on emissions projections of the Paris Agreement pledges. Environmental Research Letters, 18(5), 054026.
    • den Elzen MGJ., Kuramochi T, Höhne N, Cantzler J, Esmeijer K, Fekete H, et al.., 2019. Are the G20 economies making enough progress to meet their NDC targets? Energy Policy 126, 238-250.
  • Nascimento, L., Kuramochi, T., Woollands, S., M., Moisio, M., de Villafranca Casas, M.J., Hans, F., De Vivero-Serrano, G., Fekete, H., Pelekh, N. Lui, S., Wong, J. and Höhne, N. Dafnomilis, I., den Elzen, M., Hooijschuur, E.,, Forsell, N., Gutiérrez, Z.A., Gusti, 2023. Greenhouse gas mitigation scenarios for major emitters. Analysis of current climate policies and mitigation commitments: 2023 Update. NewClimate Institute, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

References

  • Forsell N, Turkovska O, Gusti M, Obersteiner M, Den Elzen MGJ and Havlik P. (2016). Assessing the INDCs’ land use, land use change, and forest emission projections. Carbon Balance and Management 11, 26.
  • Grassi G, House J, Dentener F, Federici S, Den Elzen MGJ and Penman J. (2017). The key role of forests in meeting climate targets requires science for credible mitigation. Nature Climate Change 7, 220–226.
  • Gütschow, J.; Pflüger, M. (2023): The PRIMAP-hist national historical emissions time series v2.5 (1750-2022). zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.10006301.
  • Höhne N, den Elzen M, Rogelj J, et al. (2020) Emissions: world has four times the work or one-third of the time. Nature 579: pp. 25-28, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00571-x
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  • Roelfsema M, van Soest HL, Harmsen M, van Vuuren DP, Bertram C, den Elzen M, . . . Vishwanathan SS (2020) Taking stock of national climate policies to evaluate implementation of the Paris Agreement. Nature Communications 11:2096. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15414-6
  • Roelfsema, M., van Soest, H. L., den Elzen, M., de Coninck, H., Kuramochi, T., Harmsen, M., Dafnomilis, I., Höhne, N., & van Vuuren, D. P. (2022). Developing scenarios in the context of the Paris Agreement and application in the integrated assessment model IMAGE: A framework for bridging the policy-modelling divide. Environmental Science & Policy, 135, 104–116. doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2022.05.00
  • Rogelj J, Den Elzen MGJ, Höhne N, Fransen T, Fekete H, Winkler H, Schaeffer R, Sha F, Riahi K and Meinshausen M. (2016). Paris Agreement climate proposals need a boost to keep warming well below 2 °C. Nature 534, 631–639.
  • United Nations Statistics Division (2023), GDP and its breakdown at constant 2015 prices in US Dollars - All countries for all years - sorted alphabetically [Data set]. Retrieved from unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/downloads
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  • United Nations Environment Programme (2022). Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window — Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies. Nairobi. www.unep.org/emissions-gap-report-2022
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Authors website

Michel den Elzen, Ioannis Dafnomilis, Elena Hooijschuur and Allard Warrink.