Nationally Determined Contributions

Since the Paris Agreement was adopted at the end of 2015, countries have been working to implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – the main vehicle for driving down greenhouse gas emissions globally. The scope and ambition of NDCs vary greatly by country, as do the domestic policy frameworks they are working within to achieve their goals.

Our recent publications explore policy options for countries to deliver on their NDCs:

In December 2016 we released research to better understand the GHG targets of G20 countries in a working paper, Translating Targets into Numbers: Quantifying the Greenhouse Gas Targets of the G20 Countries.

All these publications were drawn from to create NDCs One Year On – An overview of G20 countries’ action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which offers a high-level view of progress made on G20 countries’ NDCs thus far.

In addition to our country-specific analyses, our Climate Policy Implementation Tracking Framework allows users to track the adoption and implementation of climate mitigation policies. This framework is complemented by WRI’s climate data explorer, the Climate Analysis Indicators Tool (CAIT), now CAIT 2.0, which provides free access to comprehensive, reliable, and comparable greenhouse gas emissions data sets, as well as other climate-relevant indicators, to enable analysis on a wide range of climate-related data questions.

Informing the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions

Before the Paris Agreement was adopted, Parties to the UNFCCC announced “intended nationally determined contributions” (INDCs), which included new GHG mitigation pledges for the post-2020 climate agreement. OCN conducted analysis to provide input into the establishment of these pledges.

As pledges were announced, OCN and its partners evaluated them with reference to the standards set out in the GHG Protocol, the Open Book initiative and other tools. OCN also evaluated the transparency of the INDCs of eight focus countries/regions (Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and the United States).

OCN is committed to tracking progress on climate policy by identifying key policy approaches and monitoring their implementation. OCN’s GHG mitigation policy landscape working paper series provides an overview of the policy landscape that key countries and regions (Australia, Brazil, European Union, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have pursued in the interest of greenhouse gas mitigation.

Climate Finance

OCN’s working papers on fast-start climate finance in Germany, Japan, Norway, UK, and the US (US update) examine how developed countries defined, delivered, and reported fast-start finance during the 2010-2012 funding period. This work is also summarized in a crosscutting finance capstone report.

Clean Energy

OCN’s working paper Delivering on the Clean Energy Economy: The Role of Policy in Developing Successful Domestic Solar and Wind Industries examines the development of the solar PV and wind industries across China, Germany, India, Japan, and the US from 2001-2011. It takes a comparative approach to track the policies and incentives put in place by these key competitors, documents the state of play in each market, and determines what policy strategies seem to have been most successful to date. The paper Assessing The Post-2020 Clean Energy Landscape quantifies the post-2020 clean energy plans of Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and the United States—these countries/regions collectively account for more than 65 percent of the world’s primary energy demand.