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Niklas Höhne and Hanna Fekete are authors of this year’s UNEP Emissions Gap Report. It informs governments and the wider community on how far the response to climate change has progressed over the past 12 months, and thus how far the world is currently positioned to meet the internationally agreed 2˚C limit to global warming. The fifth Emissions Gap Report goes beyond an analysis of scientific reality and the current level of ambition of nations by proposing concrete solutions on how the ambitions gap could be closed.

NewClimate Institute staff prepared the process guidance paper entitled ‘Process guidance for Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)’ for the International Partnership on Mitigation and MRV. This process guidance paper is based on early experiences of some countries and the international debate on INDCs and seeks to assist country governments in the preparation of their INDCs. The Conference of the Parties (COP 19) in Warsaw decided to “initiate or intensify domestic preparations for their intended nationally determined contributions” so that they can be submitted well in advance...

The current project-based carbon market mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Joint Implementation (JI) do not have a direct impact on global greenhouse gas emission levels, because they only replace or offset emissions. Nor do they contribute to host country׳s national greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. Contributions to net emission reductions in host countries is likely to become mandatory in new mechanisms under development such as in the framework for various approaches, a new market-based mechanism and even in a reformed JI. This research analysed the...

This CDI Practice Paper addresses the role of tools in supporting interventions to achieve the ‘triple wins’ of adaptation, mitigation and development. Over recent years there has been a proliferation of guidance tools to support adaptation or mitigation, increasingly in a development context, but little work on the role tools play in helping to bridge the gap between these three areas in practice. Based on a review of tools in view of ‘climate compatible development’, the paper suggests key considerations for how tools could help achieve ‘triple wins’. They include: the importance of...

Many of the major greenhouse gas emitting countries have planned and/or implemented domestic mitigation policies, such as carbon taxes, feed-in tariffs, or standards. This study analyses whether the most effective national climate and energy policies are sufficient to stay on track for meeting the emission reduction proposals (pledges) that countries made for 2020. The analysis shows that domestic policies of India, China and Russia are projected to lead to lower emission levels than the pledged levels. Australia's and the EU's nationally legally binding policy framework is likely to deliver...

The results are presented from a survey of national legislation and strategies to mitigate climate change covering almost all United Nations member states between 2007 and 2012. This data set is distinguished from the existing literature in its breadth of coverage, its focus on national policies (rather than international pledges), and on the use of objective metrics rather than normative criteria. The focus of the data is limited to national climate legislation and strategies and does not cover subnational or sectoral measures. Climate legislation and strategies are important because they can...

The paper proposes a clear process for regularly updating and strengthening national commitments. The climate regime needs to move out of continuous negotiation and into a framework of continuous implementation. The paper proposes no explicit differentiation of countries. Rather countries would propose nationally determined commitments, guided by the multilaterally agreed phase out goal and the international review. This would maximize participation. The Agreement should also include provisions for recognizing the actions of parties unable to ratify and for deterring egregious cases of free...

Over 40 studies that analyse future GHG emissions allowances or reduction targets for different regions based on a wide range of effort-sharing approaches and long-term concentration stabilization levels are compared. This updates previous work undertaken for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Regional reduction targets differ significantly for each effort-sharing approach. For example, in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 1990 region, new proposals that emphasize the equity principles of responsibility, capability...

In the context of recent discussions at the UN climate negotiations we compared several ways of calculating historical greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and assessed the effect of these different approaches on countries’ relative contributions to cumulative global emissions. Elements not covered before are: (i) including recent historical emissions (2000–2010), (ii) discounting historical emissions to account for technological progress; (iii) deducting emissions for ‘basic needs’; (iv) including projected emissions up to 2020, based on countries’ unconditional reduction proposals for 2020. Our...