What
Ratcheting up ambition through NDC enhancement is crucial for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. The enhancement process, where countries present updated NDCs to the UNFCCC every 5 years, holds major opportunities for countries to align their climate and development agendas to promote sustainable growth, but it also presents challenges in reinventing policies and mobilizing investment. Raising ambition by strengthening mitigation and adaptation targets, improving NDC quality through stronger baseline data, and strengthening underlying processes, like stakeholder consultations, are all examples of how countries are enhancing their NDCs.
The NDCs submitted in 2015 were often developed quickly with limited resources, data, and engagement from key parts of government and society, resulting in missed opportunities to link climate and development agendas and enable ambitious and inclusive climate action. Learning from this experience, countries are approaching their 2020 NDC more systematically.
How
Countries are taking a variety of approaches to enhance their NDCs. They are applying whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches: involving different ministries, sub-national stakeholders and governments, and key segments of society like the private sector, youth, and women. Countries are improving underlying data and MRV systems. And they are costing their NDCs to ensure that climate targets are not only ambitious, but also have a realistic prospect of implementation.
The NDC Partnership is supporting countries to enhance their NDCs as part of the 2020 update process by delivering targeted, fast-track support to countries, including through the Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP) as well as existing country engagement support. Through CAEP, 46 of the Partnership’s members are providing financial and technical support to 65 countries to enhance their 2020 NDCs.
