This is part two of a two-part series. Read the first part.
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?
In Part 1, we laid out a non-exhaustive list of questions that cast doubt on the relevance and adaptiveness of the NDC process to the needs and priorities of the Global South and the current turbulent geopolitical order.
Various proposals have been raised to address the myriad perceived gaps in the climate governance process. There have been emerging discussions on reforming the UNFCCC process, remodelling NDCs as investments plans, testing out promising new ideas such as country platforms, defining what ‘implementation’ means and incorporating green industrial strategies closely linked to countries’ green growth aspirations into the NDC process. Experts have also recommended that the UNFCCC should ask countries to show how they plan to make strategic investments as part of broader national plans for green development.
To seek further guidance, we approached veteran experts in climate governance for their reflections on this issue and their vision of climate planning for the Global South in a fractured world.
The key issue with current NDCs is whether or not they are real commitments, or like the net-zero targets — numbers announced without credible pathways to get there. Many developed countries, such as Australia and United Kingdom, are releasing ambitious new targets. This is very positive, but do they have concrete plans and benchmarks, or are they simply numbers for applause? How do you pledge a higher target without, for example, pledging to cease oil and gas production in some of these countries?
Moreover, past promises have not necessarily been met — be it previous targets by developed countries, or financing conditions in the conditional NDCs outlined by many developing countries. So new “ambitious targets” need to be held to the fire on past progress and credible pathways for the future. Climate change is real — our actions and pledges must be too.
NDCs are better understood as a focal point for national politics and policy than as a mechanism of international naming and shaming. To what extent and how can countries envision national political goals and interests — energy security, jobs, liveable cities, air pollution — lining up with lower-carbon pathways and greater resilience? What concrete measures make sense and what will they cost, financially and politically?
So framed, NDCs can be vehicles for channelling emergent conversations on green industrial policy. They could also, potentially, be the basis for a real conversation about financing needs and the obligations of the North. To play this role, NDCs would have to focus as much or more on ‘how’ as on ‘what’ and ‘by when’. And the Paris Agreement process would return to its true roots — an enabling rather than regulating framework.
The current cycle of voluntary pledges is a trap designed to fail the Global South. Demanding climate ambition from developing nations while historic polluters perpetually fail to deliver on their financial and technological commitments is fundamentally unjust.
Climate planning in the South must champion a green industrial strategy focused on resilient development and energy sovereignty. Civil society's demands must pivot from abstract targets to concrete justice: holding the Global North accountable for its climate debt. This is the only prerequisite for legitimate global climate action.
The Global South must raise its voice and call for the strict fulfilment of the Paris Agreement, urging developed countries to honour their historical responsibility for climate change by demonstrating their commitment to achieve carbon neutrality no later than 2030 and to move towards net-negative emissions thereafter.
This requires global pressure to ensure that the United States returns to the Paris Agreement and genuinely fulfils its obligations in confronting climate change. Any other path would impose an unjust climate transition. As developed countries expand military budgets and cut climate finance, civil society in the Global North must mobilise to redirect those resources towards defending life and the planet.
The Paris Agreement was possible, in large part, because of the pivot from a focus on sharing the burden of climate mitigation to capturing the benefits of climate action. However, a second pivot is now required — to move from climate co-benefits to policies that drive structural transformations. Yet developing countries face international system-level constraints, whether related to trade or finance, that crowd out space for industrial policies. Therefore, there needs to be a focus on addressing those constraints.
While the Paris Agreement provides an international legal framework for climate cooperation, its success will ultimately depend on efforts outside the climate regime to help align growth paths with development goals.
Clearly, high emission-reduction targets for NDCs alone cannot drive climate action in the Global South, especially when there are several limiting trends. As we understand, demand for localisation and protectionism is hardening in the Global South while the rule-based multilateral framework and international cooperation are weakening. Domestic resource needs are growing, while national budgets are strained due to high debt burdens, the high cost of capital and financial instability. When the demand for contextual solutions through domestic action is needed the most, economic vulnerability is weakening public and political support for ambitious NDCs.
There are no clear answers to these complexities in these changed times. While the Global South needs its own reform agenda, alternative financial mechanisms and innovative fiscal policies, it also has to leverage multipolar cooperation to influence the international financial architecture to lower its cost of finance, gain access to concessional funding and ensure more climate-aligned investments.
It will be interesting, however, to explore whether the NDCs can be leveraged to strengthen the negotiating power of the Global South if formulated with conditional demands — not only to unlock new economic opportunities and cooperation but also to set the terms of global politics to reinvent the multilateral framework and build more effective enablers. Is that too much to expect?