February 7, 2025

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SEI voices: How updated NDCs can accelerate climate action

As progress on the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda falters, government officials must now translate synergies between the sustainable development goals, climate, and biodiversity to their national context.

To support this work, all countries need to improve the domestic standing of their upcoming NDCs, integrate climate action, and align the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with national priorities.

Simply put, NDCs should spearhead a nationally-driven shared vision for the future that builds on climate and sustainable development synergies as being net positive for societies. By failing to do this, and consequently failing to accelerate implementation, countries risk undermining hard-won global achievements that, in some cases, took decades to negotiate.

Connections between climate action and the SDGs have since long been established, visualized, and assessed, but are nevertheless, in most cases, neither explicit nor intentionally consistent with domestic policy priorities.

With the arrival of the third generation of NDCs, expected in early 2025, countries face a difficult task to ensure that ambitions are raised, but also to heed advice and signal intention to implement the 2030 adaptation and mitigation goals agreed upon at the 2023 Global Stock take and also to fulfill the sustainable development duties outlined in the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report.

Enhancing global ambition and integration in the domestic policy landscape are intertwined. If implemented well, successful implementation of climate action can help spark more ambition.

Learning from experience

Comparing the countries that have published the first and the second generation NDCs, some lessons can be learned.

The increased ambition between the first and second rounds has produced almost 68% more activities, outlining countries’ adaptation and mitigation actions, according to our NDC-SDG Connections tool. This tool also shows that countries’ climate action, when aggregated, connects across all Sustainable Development Goals while putting significant emphasis on energy, agriculture, land use, and sustainable cities.

Despite the overall increase, however, the type of goals and objectives being set in the NDCs are predominantly generic, with no quantified goals or targets. This signals that, despite increasing ambition, NDCs are not being translated into domestic action. A positive sign, however, is that the share of quantified activities has increased, rising from 13% to 23% overall.

When broken down at the SDG level, a similar story appears, with the majority of quantified targets linked to goals of expanding affordable and clean energy and promoting life on land.

Meanwhile, targets falling within the social dimension of sustainable development remain underrepresented, both in the total number of activities and in terms of quantified targets. Goals on reducing inequality and poverty are among those with the lowest growth in specific targets in both absolute and relative terms.

This is also true for certain targets in non-social goals. Taking the affordable and clean energy goal as an example, 90% of quantified targets are related to renewable energy and energy efficiency. Meanwhile, only 10% of the quantified targets aim at increasing access to energy.

How to improve the next round of NDCs, then?

First, strengthen and quantify most, if not all, adaptation and mitigation objectives. Here, less is more. Fewer objectives that are set, measurable, and verifiable, e.g. by including milestones would ensure a better opportunity to implement them.

Second, we need a more even distribution of synergistic climate action across the environmental, social, and economic dimensions. While not all targets are equally important, all SDGs should be. For example, strengthening interactions between energy access and affordability in NDCs, particularly in vulnerable countries, can accelerate on-the-ground change.

Finally, NDC analysis from the United Nations Development Programme has shown that country ownership and integration are drivers of increased domestic ambition on climate action. To connect global and domestic priorities, countries need to increase their coordination efforts, horizontally between ministries and agencies and vertically, between local and national governments and global processes. This must be followed by ensuring policy coherence across multiple policies and issue areas by undertaking meaningful assessments of cross-sectoral policy interaction to develop strategies for building synergies and minimizing adverse consequences.

These are crucial prerequisites for effective integration of climate change and sustainable development across domestic institutional silos.

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