Nearly 200 nations faced a Monday deadline to file what the United Nations’ climate secretary calls “among the most important policy documents governments will produce this century”—their plans on how they will cut emissions of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that cause climate change.
Most won’t make the deadline. The UN says that’s OK as long as countries are working on them.
So far only a dozen of the 195 nations that signed the 2015 Paris climate agreement have filed their national plans for cutting emissions by 2035. Those nations account for only 16.2% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions—the chief human-caused heat-trapping gas—and almost all of that is from the United States, where Donald Trump has already discarded the plan submitted by President Joe Biden’s administration.
Aside from the U.S., the only major emitters to submit 2035 targets are Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. Andorra, Ecuador, The Marshall Islands, New Zealand, Saint Lucia, Singapore, Switzerland, and Uruguay have filed their plans, but they all produce less than 0.2% of the world’s carbon dioxide.
UN Climate Secretary Simon Stiell said more than 170 countries have told his office they are working on their national plans, so he’s not worried. He emphasized quality over timeliness.
“Taking a bit more time to ensure these plans are first-rate makes sense,” Stiell said last week in a policy speech in Brazil. “These will be the most comprehensive climate plans ever developed.”
Champa Patel, policy director of the non-profit Climate Group, wasn’t as forgiving.
“It’s worrying that countries are failing to meet the urgency of the moment,” Patel said. “The world cannot afford inaction.”
These plans—officially called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—are the main mechanism of the landmark international agreement. Every five years, nations are supposed to come up with new and stronger five-year plans that outline their voluntary plans to limit or reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas.
The latest versions are supposed to be compatible with the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting long-term warming to 1.5 °C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial times. The world is now at 1.3°C and on pace to warm another 1.8°C, according to the U.N.
Scientists say the warming atmosphere is driving ever more extreme weather events, including flooding, droughts, hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires that are killing people and causing multi-billions of dollars in damage every year.
The new targets are also supposed to cover all greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulphur hexafluoride. They should cover the entire economy and not just the energy sector, according a consensus decision at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023.
Climate Action Tracker, a team of scientists and other experts who analyse nations’ climate plans for domestic emissions, rated four of the six NDC targets they’d looked at so far as “almost sufficient” for their target of holding warming to 2°C. Switzerland’s was deemed insufficient, with the group saying its plan was more compatible with 3°C of warming. The UK’s plan was rated compatible with a 1.5° future.
Britain’s plan [pdf] aims to cut emissions by at least 81% by 2035 from 1990 levels, mentioning efforts to phase out new internal combustion cars—which only use gasoline and diesel—by 2030. Brazil in its plan gave a range of emission cuts of 59% to 67% by 2035 compared to 2005 levels and put strong emphasis on climate justice, repeatedly mentioning efforts to combat deforestation.
Most of those countries were rated insufficient for the gap between what they plan to do and what they’re actually doing, and what “fair share” of global emission cuts they should strive for given their resources and history. That included the U.S., where one of Trump’s first actions when he returned to the Oval Office last month was to pull his country out of the Paris agreement (again).
“We know already right now that whatever (other) countries put out, it is not enough,” Climate Action Tracker co-founder Niklas Höhne told The Associated Press Monday. “They all need to do more.”
The deadline, set in the Paris agreement to be nine months before the next international climate negotiations, this year in Belém, Brazil, is 11:59 PM Monday in Germany, where the UN climate office is located.
But Stiell said the real deadline is in September. That’s when the United Nations will tally up all the NDCs and figure out how much emissions will be cut and how much future warming will be prevented if countries do what they promise.
That’s a big if.
The European Union and China should be done with their NDCs by the middle of the year and India will only submit its target after other major emitting nations do so, Höhne said. India has already indicated that its 2035 targets will reflect the disappointment of the COP29 outcome on climate finance in Baku, where a conference led and dominated by fossil fuel interests utterly failed to meet developing countries’ expectations for the financial support they’ll need to deliver on ambitious climate targets. Frustrated delegates called that two-week conference a “dumpster fire”, the “most horrendous climate negotiations in years”, and “band-aid on a bullet wound”.
This Associated Press story was republished by The Canadian Press on Feb. 10, 2025. With files from The Energy Mix.
