COP29: What are NDCs and why do they matter?

Climate change experts and leaders will gather in Azerbaijan in November 2024 at the end of what is likely to have been the hottest year on record.

COP29—the 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—will focus on ‘enhancing ambition’, ensuring countries commit to ambitious national targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), these commitments form the backbone of global efforts to combat climate change, and the deadline to update them is looming at the start of 2025.

But what are NDCs and why are they so important?

NDCs are at the heart of the Paris Agreement, which was adopted at COP21 in 2015. Parties agreed to keep global warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, as well as actively pursue efforts to “limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”.

The Paris Agreement is legally binding and works in a five-year cycle of increasingly ambitious commitments to climate action.

This approach has been dubbed ‘the ratchet mechanism’ as countries gradually ‘ratchet up’ their plans to reach the target of net zero by 2050.

NDCs include each country's pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with specific targets, as well as measures countries are taking to adapt to climate change, alongside implementation strategies and timeframes to achieve these goals.

As the name suggests, they are unique to each nation, reflecting their specific circumstances, capabilities and priorities in the fight against climate change.

The first NDCs were part of the Paris Agreement agreed by all 196 Parties. The first update was in 2020, and the deadline to update these commitments again is February 2025. The target is to achieve them by 2035.

Some countries will announce their second update to their NDCs in November at COP29, ahead of the February deadline.

In August, for example, the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, wrote to the Climate Change Committee asking for guidance on its 2035 NDC by the end of October.

Once submitted, all NDCs are held in the NDC Registry by the UNFCCC – where you can see the previous updates – and some countries, including Chile and the UK, have enshrined their NDCs in law.

The World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Climate Watch platform is launching an interactive NDC Tracker ahead of COP29, which will enable users to track and analyze the new submissions.

Serving as catalysts for national climate policies and actions, NDCs drive investments in clean energy, sustainable transportation and climate-resilient infrastructure.

NDCs also promote transparency and accountability in global climate efforts, as countries are required to regularly report on their progress.

Detailed, ambitious and credible NDCs set emissions reduction targets for key polluting sectors, such as energy and transportation, while ensuring national policies such as fossil fuel subsidies don’t stand in the way of progress.

The level of detail can include plans for creating jobs in clean technology industries and the outline of projects, policies and financing needs that can actually help to attract funding.

Existing NDCs are not nearly ambitious enough to limit global warming to below 1.5°C, according to the WRI. “The actions outlined in existing NDCs are on track for a catastrophic 2.5-2.9°C of warming by 2100,” it says.

In 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) summary of five years of reports said that to keep within the 1.5°C limit, emissions need to be reduced by at least 43% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels and at least 60% by 2035.

In April 2024, WRI experts identified a five-point plan for the next-generation NDCs, urging governments to “go much further in their emissions cuts than their current NDCs”.

Developed countries, the world’s largest emitters historically, also had a responsibility to “make the deepest reductions while providing substantially more finance to help developing countries accelerate climate action”.

In 2023, an analysis by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) found developing and vulnerable nations are “making concrete progress on ambition”. For example, pledges from African countries are more robust than the global average, it found.

Some countries, including Germany, have signalled they intend to introduce ‘net-negative’ targets when more greenhouse gases are removed than emitted. This goes beyond net zero, which balances the two.

At COP28 in December 2023, Denmark, Finland and Panama started the Group of Negative Emitters (GONE). In July 2024, the UK’s Climate Change Committee reported that “only a third of the emissions reductions required to achieve the country’s 2030 target are currently covered by credible plans”.

While reducing carbon entering the atmosphere is the most pressing challenge, speeding up the rate at which we remove carbon is equally important to meeting the Paris targets.

The IPCC says reaching net zero alone will require a "substantial reduction in overall fossil fuel use, minimal use of unabated fossil fuels, and use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the remaining fossil fuel systems; energy conservation and efficiency; and greater integration across the energy system".

Innovation in CCS and Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) is needed to rebalance CO2 levels in the atmosphere and prevent future warming.

But given the urgency, scaling ‘engineered’ Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies, including Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) and Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) is also critical.

"Even if every country and every company achieves net zero by 2050, it won't be enough. We will need to keep removing CO2 for decades afterwards – to reverse the accumulation of historic emissions," writes Nasim Pour, Lead, Carbon Removals and Market Innovation, World Economic Forum in the Carbon Dioxide Removal: Best-Practice Guidelines white paper.

Members of the Forum’s First Movers Coalition – a group aiming to accelerate the decarbonization of hard-to-abate sectors – have committed to contracting for 50,000 tonnes or $25 million worth of durable and scalable carbon removal by 2030.