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Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement last year, parties have continued to show tremendous commitment by ratifying the Agreement at record speed, passing the two thresholds (55% of countries producing at least 55% of emissions) in less than a year. This enables the Agreement to enter into force early, just before COP 22 in Marrakesh.

At the core of the Paris Agreement are the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which define  countries’ plans and targets for strengthening their mitigation efforts and increasing their resilience. Parties are also required to increase the level of ambition behind their NDCs every five years as necessary to achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement – keeping global temperature rise well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.

In the run-up to COP 21 in Paris, all parties were invited to submit their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), with almost universal INDC submission by the end of last year. For all ratifying parties, the ‘Intended’ now disappears and INDCs become NDCs. The next critical step will be to implement the climate action that all countries have agreed to.

However, despite the common responsibility to achieve the global goal through NDCs, not all countries are at the same stage of development, nor do they have the same capacities. The development of the INDCs was the first time some countries had set national climate targets. Many of them also need to strengthen their institutional frameworks, develop financial instruments and improve their transparency and monitoring systems to track and evaluate progress.

A number of initiatives have therefore been launched to support NDC refinement and implementation while also taking into account the Sustainable Development Goals. Among these initiatives are donor country programmes such as the US NDC Leadership Compact and the NDC Support Cluster, which is part of the German International Climate Initiative (IKI).

For donor and recipient country governments alike, it is extremely important to keep a good overview of the initiatives and to achieve effective coordination between stakeholders. Against this background, the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation,
Building and Nuclear Safety and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), working with the World Resources Institute (WRI), have initiated the new global NDC Partnership.

The NDC Partnership is based on the premise that sustainable development and climate action are mutually reinforcing and cannot be viewed separately. It therefore brings together governments, institutions and research organisations to coordinate actions, build capacity, and  harmonise existing climate and development goals. The Partnership will be launched during COP22 in Marrakesh in November and will then be open to all countries which support the Partnership’s guiding principles.