As COP30 nears, the Paris Agreement’s system of voluntary national climate pledges faces a deep crisis of credibility.
The “NDC death loop” of ambition, disappointment, and renewed demands is undermining trust in climate governance.
Developing nations struggle to meet escalating emission targets amid shrinking global cooperation and inadequate finance.
The Global South’s core development needs — energy access, industrialisation, and equitable growth — remain largely ignored.
Climate ambition must be redefined to reflect diverse national pathways, not just higher emission cuts.
This is part one of a two-part series.
With climate impacts escalating, climate action remains one of the most urgent imperatives. Yet the architecture of climate governance and its global coordination and monitoring mechanisms — based on five-year cycles of self-determined national targets or NDCs under the 2015 Paris Agreement — faces strong headwinds: Military conflicts, trade wars, sovereign debt burdens and battered multilateralism.
As the 30th Conference of Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) approaches, this begs the question — is the cycle of demanding ‘ambitious’ NDCs hinged on emission-cutting targets serving the purpose of climate or low-carbon development, particularly for the Global South?
Before the Paris Agreement, the world was on track for a much higher level of warming, over 4 degrees Celsius (°C) above pre-industrial levels; but experts suggest that pledges brought estimates down to approximately 2.7°C. Moreover, country NDCs have potentially created positive and predictable demand signals for clean technology investment and proliferation worldwide. Yet the lack of consideration for differentiated trajectories across countries and the neglect of development aspirations of the Global South reveal crucial gaps in the architecture.
Paris marked a shift from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which imposed top-down differentiated targets based on countries’ development levels. The Paris model, seen as more politically feasible by articulating nationally determined “contributions” rather than commitments, sought to mobilise “coalitions of the willing” (unlike Kyoto, where major developed countries like the United States resisted legally binding higher targets).
A decade later, however, we are meeting neither global climate goals nor the development aspirations of the Global South.
The pattern repeats: Civil society and multilateral actors demand “strong, ambitious NDCs”; governments launch lukewarm targets with pomp; observers dissect and shame them for their lack of ambition; few achieve even the weak goals and calls for greater ambition return. This ‘NDC death loop’ must be broken.
Further, in a year marked by disruptions to multilateral agreements unprecedented in the modern era and a televised genocide, we find our visions clouded by further questions, which we address below.
What is the relevance of asking for higher emissions-reduction targets from countries being battered by competing crises and with little (and further retreating) international cooperation to assist the transition? One estimate suggested that the NDCs of 91 countries representing 51 per cent of the global population list about $1.6 trillion as funds needed to achieve their “conditional” pledges.
Assuming this may roughly be for the period 2022-2030, it translates to about $178 billion annually. The latest estimate for climate finance provided by developed countries was $115.9 billion in 2022 — an inadequate sum, especially considering that the $1.6 trillion applies to 91 countries only and the cumulative figure will be larger.
A counter-argument is that NDCs must be presented with greater detail on costed items to attract finance, or must be produced as “investible plans”. Developing countries with already constrained government capacity are providing a high level of detail, as illustrated by Sudan’s NDC.
The document states that “Given the difficult economic circumstances Sudan is currently facing, the government will strive to cover 15 per cent of the estimated cost of NDC implementation”, which means that the expectation is that 85 per cent, or $0.7 billion, will be sought annually from external sources.
While individual climate finance disbursements for countries are not reported, one could look at Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures for climate-related development finance to Sudan to find past trajectories indicating that only around 20 per cent of this has been committed (ie, $0.14 billion) and future flows need to scale up substantially.
When countries have provided detailed investment plans even beyond the UNFCCC’s purview, such as Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition Partnership, the outcome has been a donor-dictated negotiation that translates to minimal actual flow of funds. The bottom-up Comprehensive Investment and Policy Plan (CIPP) produced by Indonesia has run into disagreements, with the government raising concerns about high-interest loans primarily offered by donors and donor governments objecting to Indonesia’s energy transition trajectory outlined in the investment plan. Conditionalities to access concessional funding have been added, such as easing local-content rules. Only a fraction of the committed funds has been disbursed so far.
The breakdown of multilateral norms by developed nations, as seen in their selective adherence to global agreements and the dilution of climate finance pledges, contrasts sharply with how developing countries remain bound by the moral scrutiny of the UNFCCC process — which remains crucial, but is maladapted to current times. How do we reckon with this dissonance?
How can NDCs be meaningful when they are essentially cyclical demands for higher emission-reduction targets and do not adequately address real barriers faced by developing countries — outdated trade rules, high capital costs, dependence on exports, impacts of unilateral trade measures? Moreover, framing NDCs solely as climate targets divorces them from countries’ core development aspirations like industrialisation, growth and energy access.
This is neither compelling enough to secure support from domestic political constituencies and drivers of state action, nor is it sustainable in the long run in the face of global shocks. China’s experience, treating green industrialisation as a strategy for competitiveness rather than solely for climate compliance, shows that framing matters.
The debate on ‘ambition’ is too often reduced to ever-higher emissions targets, overlooking the diverse transitions already underway. BRICS countries, for instance, are expanding renewables even as they continue to rely on fossil fuels to secure energy access and growth. A similar green-and-brown duality is evident in other emerging economies — the Gulf countries’ renewable investments and economic diversification aimed at hedging against oil dependence, China’s powering of the green transition both domestically and globally, and India gradually raising renewables in its power mix while also pursuing clean-tech manufacturing policies are cases in point. Should ambition continue to be measured only through higher targets, or should it also account for how developing countries pursue climate action through development-oriented, material contributions?
This list of observations is certainly non-exhaustive and straddles multiple questions like the subjectivity of assessing “climate ambition” while neglecting Global South growth trajectories, the situation of climate targets in the current turbulent and increasingly morally bankrupt world, and the treatment of climate as a siloed issue separate from other imperatives such as industrialisation and competitiveness.
In Part 2, we open up the discussion further by asking a few experts to weigh in with their views.