Abstract
Many countries have implemented national climate policies to accomplish pledged Nationally Determined Contributions and to contribute to the temperature objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change. In 2023, the global stocktake will assess the combined effort of countries. Here, based on a public policy database and a multi-model scenario analysis, we show that implementation of current policies leaves a median emission gap of 22.4 to 28.2 GtCO2eq by 2030 with the optimal pathways to implement the well below 2 °C and 1.5 °C Paris goals. If Nationally Determined Contributions would be fully implemented, this gap would be reduced by a third. Interestingly, the countries evaluated were found to not achieve their pledged contributions with implemented policies (implementation gap), or to have an ambition gap with optimal pathways towards well below 2 °C. This shows that all countries would need to accelerate the implementation of policies for renewable technologies, while efficiency improvements are especially important in emerging countries and fossil-fuel-dependent countries.
Highlights
Many countries have implemented national climate policies to accomplish pledged Nationally Determined Contributions and to contribute to the temperature objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change
We divide the total emissions gap between national policies and well below 2 °C pathways into an implementation gap referring to the difference between the impact of national policies and the nationally determined contributions (NDCs), and an ambition gap referring to the difference between the impact of the NDCs and well below 2 °C emission pathways
Owing to the aggregation level of most Integrated assessment models (IAMs), our analysis is limited to the national policies and NDCs for G20 economies that represent 75% of total 2010 greenhouse gas emissions
Summary
Many countries have implemented national climate policies to accomplish pledged Nationally Determined Contributions and to contribute to the temperature objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change. The Paris Agreement facilitates a global stocktake in 2023, which is expected to take stock of the collective efforts and to inform the preparation of more ambitious NDCs. For this, clear insights are needed into the impact of current implemented national policies from individual countries. No peer reviewed literature exists that has assessed the global and country impact of national climate policies on the basis of a comprehensive policy inventory by using a suite of integrated assessment models, and using this to guide additional policy implementation. A selection from this database was made that consisted of around ten policies for each G20 country that were expected to have high impact on greenhouse gas emissions based on literature or national expert opinion, that were adopted by national governments trough legislation or executive orders, and no evidence exists of large barriers to implementation. The results are presented at the global level and for the seven large emitting economies for which national models were available, i.e., Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Russian Federation and the United States, together representing around 65% of global 2010 greenhouse gas emissions[18]
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