Countries, including members of the G20, should strengthen the credibility of their pledges to limit or reduce annual emissions of greenhouse gases in order to build confidence in the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The report identifies the key determinants for policy credibility against which each country’s INDC pledges could be assessed. These are applied to the INDCs that were submitted by G20 members ahead of the Paris summit. No G20 country is found to have ‘no credible basis’ for their INDC across the determinants explored in this analysis. However, there are significant differences in the level of and balance among the determinants of credibility for the individual countries. Notably, three broad groups of countries can be identified: 1) Countries with most of the determinants at a level ‘largely supportive’ to credibility; 2) Countries with most of the determinants at least ‘moderately supportive’ to credibility, but displaying significant weakness in one of the determinants; 3) Countries that have scope to significantly increase their credibility across most determinants.