Current commitments to fight climate change are not sufficient. At the same time, countries, cities, and regions are facing the challenge of how to recover from COVID-19. Any upcoming recovery packages will have to be in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. A pathway compatible with the Paris Agreement will be locked in – or not – in the aftermath of the crisis. There will likely not be another opportunity to mobilise finance in the order of magnitude already seen since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2020, countries’ plans for climate action in the form of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) shall be renewed and/or updated. The coronavirus crisis has changed the conditions under which governments are operating. Many of the underlying assumptions on which NDCs are based – such as the availability of domestic budget resources, borrowing headroom or access to international climate finance, economic growth, and emission trajectories – are being called into question. Travel restrictions have also meant that COP26 has been deferred until November 2021. On the other hand, the measures many governments were already developing for their NDCs form an excellent basis for coronavirus recovery packages.
This paper suggests that the following recommendations apply to the NDC update process, taking the coronavirus crisis into account:
- Engage subnational governments in NDC design, through strengthened dialogue between national and subnational levels, for example through stakeholder consultations.
- Create fora for subnational actors to present their climate initiatives and contributions and include them in NDCs or its background documentation.
- Establish a coordination mechanism that oversees the NDC development and the sustainable recovery, as a way of managing the process of project consideration and keep an updated list of projects compatible with the climate targets.