Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are a cornerstone of the Paris Agreement on climate change. They set out the actions that countries plan to undertake to achieve the agreement’s objectives, focused on limiting the rise in average global temperatures to well below 2°C, ideally to 1.5 °C.
Renewable energy features prominently in most of these NDCs, confirming that the transition to a renewable energy future has come to be recognised globally as central to addressing climate change. Governments are well underway with implementing the first set of NDCs and will begin to review them in 2018. This entails taking stock of the adequacy of those NDCs to meet the objectives set out in the historic 2015 climate agreement. NDCs will be revised or updated by 2020, and every five years thereafter – with each revision aimed at being more ambitious than the previous one.
Meeting the 1.5 °C goal will require a rapid scale-up of zero-carbon energy supply, fuel switching to electricity, efficiency and demand-reduction in all sectors, and the replenishment of natural carbon sinks. These transformations will have immediate impacts on various of the sustainable development goals. As goals such as affordable and clean energy and zero hunger are more immediate to great parts of global population, these impacts are central for societal acceptability of climate policies. Yet, little is known about how the achievement of other social and environmental sustainability objectives can be directly managed through emission reduction policies. In addition, the integrated assessment literature has so far emphasized a single, global (cost-minimizing) carbon price as the optimal mechanism to achieve emissions reductions.
