PBL Climate Pledge NDC tool

The Paris Agreement aims to limit global mean temperature increase to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it to below 1.5 °C. To achieve this, more than 190 Parties have submitted Nationally Determined Contributions, so-called NDCs, outlining their climate action beyond 2020. By 1 April 2025, 180 Parties (including the EU and its 27 EU Member States), representing about 94% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, had communicated their new or updated NDCs (Climate Watch, 2025). In 2025, countries need to submit updated NDCs outlining new mitigation targets for 2035, ideally alongside strengthened targets for 2030. The PBL Climate Pledge NDC tool shows the targets in the submitted NDCs (including the updates) and the pledges made earlier for 2020. For 25 major emitting Parties, the tool compares these targets with greenhouse gas emission projections under current domestic climate policies up to 2030.

This page was last updated 23 April, 2025

NDC emission targets and the impact of policies

Global

Share of global emissions in 2019: 100%

Source: PBL, 2025

Main general findings

The figure shows the impact of projected aggregated emission reductions resulting from the full implementation of most unconditional and conditional NDCs submitted to date, compared to the current policy scenario, and the least-cost 2 °C and 1.5 °C scenarios. The main findings are:

All of the 25 Parties analysed have climate policies in place that reduce emissions, but for 12 of these Parties, reductions fall short of the reduction targets in their current NDCs.
However, the projected emission levels from current climate policies are about 5% lower in 2030 compared to the previous update in 2023, mainly due to the influence of faster renewable uptake in China and India and additional policies in Canada, the USA and Colombia.
The emission reductions resulting from the 2030 NDCs will still be insufficient to put the world on a cost-effective pathway to keeping global temperature increase below 2 °C. Implementation of the unconditional and conditional NDCs would still leave an emission gap of 11 and 9 GtCO₂e, respectively, to securing this likely chance.
For limiting temperature increase to 1.5 °C, the gap is about 8 GtCO₂e larger for both NDC scenarios, i.e. the unconditional and conditional NDC scenario. The required emission level by 2030 is determined by assuming a cost-optimal global reduction pathway from 2023 onwards.

The gap is so large that governments, the private sector and local communities need to make their climate pledges more ambitious and focus on early and more stringent mitigation action, next to developing a new NDC for 2035. Some countries, regions, cities and businesses have promised or implemented urgently needed climate action (Höhne et al., 2020). Closing the gap will require scaling up these few success stories and mirroring them with progress in every sector.

Progress of countries towards achieving their NDCs

The report by Nascimento et al. (2024) provides an overview of projected greenhouse gas emissions, for 25 major emitting countries/regions (map below ) up to 2030, taking into account the emission trajectories based on current policies and the implementation of NDCs. Current policy trajectories reflect all adopted and implemented policies, defined here as legislative decisions, executive orders, or their equivalent. This excludes publicly announced plans or strategies, while individual policies to implement such plans or strategies would qualify.

The figure above shows progress made by countries towards achieving their self-imposed 2030 targets of the current NDCs, under current policies:

About 12 out of the 25 major emitting countries not on track to achieve 2030 targets set in their NDC. The analysis takes into account current policy developments and considers the most recent NDC submissions. The degree to which the 25 major emitting countries are likely to achieve their latest NDC targets under current policies was found to vary:

Of the 25 countries and regions studied here, 6 are on track to achieve their self-proclaimed unconditional 2030 NDC targets, with currently implemented policies. These include Iran, Vietnam, the Russian Federation, India, Mexico and Ethiopia. An additional 6 countries - China, Morocco, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, the EU27 and South Africa - are likely on track to meet their targets, but need to fully implement existing policies and possibly take additional actions to make sure they stay on track. Egypt, the only country analysed with only a conditional NDC target, is also on track to meet this target.
Although all countries should consider increasing the ambition of their NDCs, the countries that are (likely) on track for their current NDC are particularly well positioned to do so.
It should be noted that a country that is likely to meet its NDC does not necessarily undertake a more stringent mitigation action than a country that is not on track. Targets vary in their level of ambition across the countries. A country that is not on track to meet its NDC target may have set a very ambitious target, while a country on track to meet its NDC target may have set a relatively unambitious target. NDCs are nationally determined and heterogeneous by nature, so a fair comparison of progress between countries is not always straightforward, as countries often have different policy approaches.

About the tool

The PBL Climate Pledge NDC tool addresses the following three key questions:

What are the countries’ emissions projections for the NDCs?
Will the projected aggregated impact of the fully implemented NDCs on global emissions be sufficient to achieve the target of staying well below 2 °C / 1.5 °C?
Are countries on track to meet their future NDCs?

To address these questions, the tool shows the projected impact of the emission reduction proposals (NDCs) and current policies, per country and globally, on greenhouse gas emissions. This tool analyses the mitigation components of the NDCs of 144 of the 195 Parties (together representing about 95% of emissions in 2019). More specifically, the tool includes:

Pledges: national and global greenhouse gas emission projections for 2020 when pledges would have been fully achieved;
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs): national and global greenhouse gas emission projections when NDCs would be fully achieved;
Current policies: the impact of national climate and energy policies, such as carbon taxation, feed-in tariffs, and standards on emission levels up to 2030, of 25 major emitting countries and regions.

The projections show total emissions per country, emissions per capita, and emissions per unit of income. The various indicators provide countries with information on how their contribution compares to those of others.

Methodology

The impact of the most effective current policies on greenhouse gas emissions up to 2030 has been projected by the NewClimate Institute, IIASA and PBL (Nascimento et al., 2024; Den Elzen et al., 2022; 2023). The calculations by NewClimate Institute were largely based on its analyses for the Climate Action Tracker project, jointly carried out with Climate Analytics (CAT, 2023). Existing scenarios from national and international studies were used, as well as NewClimate Institute’s own calculations of the impact of individual policies in various sub-sectors. PBL based their calculations for the current policies scenarios (all sectors, except land use) on the IMAGE model. The basis of the PBL calculations is the SSP2 baseline (no climate policy), as implemented in the IMAGE model (Van Vuuren et al., 2017; Roelfsema et al., 2020; 2022). Current climate and energy policies in G20 countries, as identified in the ENGAGE and ELEVATE projects among others (Dafnomilis et al. 2024), were added to that baseline. For countries that are part of a larger IMAGE region (Australia, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, and the EU27), emissions projections were downscaled using the country’s share in the region’s 2022 emissions as a constant scaling factor. IIASA’s projections (the land-use sector only) were based on their global land-use model GLOBIOM and global forest model G4M.

Most of the 25 analysed countries - and many of the other countries as well - report emission target levels that include CO2 removals from activities related to the land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector. Although there are uncertainties concerning which accounting approaches and methodologies countries will apply to account for LULUCF related emissions and removals, we assume that a majority of countries will apply the net-net accounting approach, so land use emissions are included in the same way as the emissions from the other sectors (see Nascimento et al., 2023).

Quantification of the NDCs is described, in detail, in Den Elzen et al. (2022; 2023), and the quantification of the land-use targets in the NDCs is described, in detail, in Grassi et al. (2017) and Forsell et al. (2024).

Data

The GHG emissions projections were harmonised with historical emissions. Emissions for the 25 major emitting countries were harmonised with emissions submitted by Parties to the UNFCCC, up until 2021 for Annex I countries and the latest data year available for non-Annex I countries. For most Annex I countries, the historical emissions data is based on the Greenhouse Gas Inventories submitted in 2023 to the UNFCCC or those submitted in 2024 when available (UNFCCC, 2024a). For most non-Annex I countries, the historical data was taken from the most recent national reports (National Communications and Biennial Update Reports) (UNFCCC, 2024b, UNFCCC, 2024c) (when available). For details for the 25 major emitting countries, see the Annex of Nascimento et al. (2024). For other countries, we use the historical data of the PRIMAP database, in particular the 'country-reported' emissions (Gütschow and Pflüger, 2024), and the land use emissions data from the most recent national reports, as described in Forsell et al. (2024).

All GHG emission figures are expressed using the 100-year global warming potentials (GWPs) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. For most countries, emission projections encompass all greenhouse gas emissions, including those from land use, land-use change and forestry.

To calculate the per capita and per GDP indicators, we used the population projections from the UN World Population Prospects 2022 (United Nations, 2022) and the GDP projections from the World Bank (World Bank, 2023) , UNSTAT (The United Nations Statistics Division, 2023) , and the IMF World Economic Outlook (IMF, 2023), supplemented with the projections underlying the IMAGE SSP2 scenario.

Dataset

The emission projections based on the NDCs can be found in Den Elzen et al. (2022) and Nascimento et al. (2023). The data is available at:
den Elzen, M.G.J., Dafnomilis, I., Hooijschuur, E., Nascimento, L., Kuramochi, T., Woollands, S., M., Forsell, N., Gutiérrez, Z.A., Gusti (2024) Infographics PBL NDC Tool 2024, Zenodo.

Recommended citation

This website needs to be cited as: den Elzen, M.G.J., Dafnomilis, I., Forsell, N., Fragkos, P., Fragkiadakis, K., Höhne, N., Kuramochi, T., Nascimento, L., Roelfsema, M., van Soest, H., and Sperling, F., 2022. Updated nationally determined contributions collectively raise ambition levels but need strengthening further to keep Paris goals within reach. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 27 (6), 33.

Acknowledgements

This study is financed by Directorate-General Climate Action (DG-CLIMA), under Service Contract No. n°090203/2023/SER/917231/CLIMA.A.2, worked on the project “CLIMA/2023/OP/0027 - Analytical capacity for international climate action”, and the ELEVATE project, financed by the Directorate General Climate Action (DG CLIMA). We acknowledge and are grateful for the contributions of, and discussion with, all colleagues of PBL, NewClimate Institute and IIASA involved, in particular Mark Dekker, Mark Roelfsema, and Detlef van Vuuren (PBL), Leonardo Nascimento, Niklas Höhne, Takeshi Kuramochi and Jan-Luka Scheewel (all NewClimate Institute), and Zuelclady Araujo Gutierrez (IIASA), with a special thanks to Allard Warrink (PBL) for all his work on the infographics.

Main publications

den Elzen, M.G.J., Dafnomilis, I., Forsell, N., Fragkos, P., Fragkiadakis, K., Höhne, N., Kuramochi, T., Nascimento, L., Roelfsema, M., van Soest, H., and Sperling, F., 2022. Updated nationally determined contributions collectively raise ambition levels but need strengthening further to keep Paris goals within reach. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 27 (6), 33.
den Elzen, M.G.J., Dafnomilis, I., Hof, A. F., Olsson, M., Beusen, A., Botzen, W. W., ... & Rogelj, J. (2023). The impact of policy and model uncertainties on emissions projections of the Paris Agreement pledges. Environmental Research Letters, 18(5), 054026.
Nascimento, L., Scheewel, J-L, Kuramochi, T., Dafnomilis, I., Hooijschuur, E., den Elzen, M., Forsell, N., Gutiérrez, Z.A., Missirliu, A., Woollands, S., Zhang, N., Wong, J., Hagemann, M., Salsabila, N. P., Fekete, H., de Vivero, G., Pelekh, N., Godinho, C., de Villafranca Casas, M. J., Bos, A., Gusti, M. “Progress of major emitters towards climate targets: 2024 Update.” NewClimate Institute, Cologne, Germany. Available at: newclimate.org/resources/publications/progress-of-major-emitters-towards-climate-targets-2024-update

References

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Dafnomilis, I., Hooijschuur, E., Schmidt Tagomori, I., van Soest, H., Roelfsema, M., & den Elzen, M. (2024). Climate Policy Modelling Protocol [Data set]. Zenodo.
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Authors website

Michel den Elzen, Arthur Beusen, Ioannis Dafnomilis, Elena Hooijschuur and Allard Warrink (all PBL)

Leonardo Nascimento, Jan-Luka Scheewel, Takeshi Kuramochi, Santiago Woollands (all NewClimate)

Nicklas Forsell, Zuelclady Araojo Gutiérrez, Mykola Gusti (all IIASA)