National NDC/INDC Assessments

Countries have been submitting their national climate action pledges, called “Nationally Determined Contributions,” or NDCs, since 2015, prior to the Paris climate summit (prior to the entry into force of the Paris Agreement, these pledges were called INDCs, with the “I” standing for “Intended”).

We have been engaged in quantifying and assessing the mitigation components of these pledges from the very start which, thus far, resulted in various outputs:

  • NDCs/INDCs are reflected in the country pages of our Climate Equity Reference Calculator where users can easily compare countries pledges with their fair share as determined by users own choices with regards to specific equity settings
  • In the run-up to the Paris summit, we served as the technical and analytical hub to the well-regarded study Fair Shares: A Civil Society Equity Review of the INDCs, in which over 150 organizations from all over the world worked together to assess the climate pledges. It was the first comprehensive such study that assessed INDCs on an individual country basis, against justice-based benchmarks, and relative to a 1.5°C mitigation objective.
  • We published the dataset with our quantification of the INDCs/NDCs, which is one of the most comprehensive INDC/NDC quantification datasets publicly available: Holz, Christian, Tom Athanasiou, and Sivan Kartha (2017) Estimates of Emissions Levels Associated with the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)“, doi:10.7910/DVN/RIBJXF, Harvard Dataverse, V2
  • We authored a peer-reviewed journal article about our approach to INDC/NDC assessment including its quantitative results, which was published in a special issue on Climate Justice and 1.5°C in the journal “International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics”: Holz, Christian; Sivan Kartha and Tom Athanasiou (2018) “Fairly Sharing 1.5 – National Fair Shares of a 1.5°C-compliant Global Mitigation Effort” in International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 18 (Special Issue: Achieving 1.5°C and Climate Justice), 117–134. [doi: 10.1007/s10784-017-9371-z]