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With COP31 approaching, the Carbon Project Developer Forum (PD Forum) is calling on governments and international climate institutions to help turn Article 6 of the Paris Agreement into a functioning mechanism for climate investment. Article 6 has three components: Article 6.2: Provides accounting and reporting guidance for Parties to use internationally transferred mitigation outcomes towards their nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

AR7 report was scheduled for 2028 in time for Cop33 summit but some petro-states and major developing countries want to postpone it

Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are the official national climate plans of countries under the Paris Agreement. A country’s NDC outlines how it will cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to climate change. Countries must review and update their NDCs every five years, with each government deciding its needs and targets based on its local circumstances and capabilities. The submission includes emission targets with specific goals to lower GHG emissions. The aim of NDCs is to keep global warming under the 1.5C target and track climate action by showing what each country commits to in the short and medium term. The most recent NDC submissions were in 2025, which is the third cycle of NDC submissions. Recent research has highlighted the contribution of militaries to global emissions, with estimates suggesting that the everyday activity of the world’s militaries could be responsible for around 5.5% of global emissions, excluding the additional impact of conflicts. In comparison, another emissions intensive sector, global shipping, which has faced growing pressure to reduce emissions, is estimated to account for 3% of global emissions. In order to tackle climate change it’s important to account for emissions, however military emissions are frequently absent from global emissions reporting...

The latest climate pledges put forth by nations will cut global greenhouse gas emissions just 6% by 2035, a UN report has said, weeks before COP31 talks in Turkey. That is a tenth of the roughly 60% reduction from 2019 levels that scientists say is needed to limit warming to 1.5C, significantly down from last year's estimate after the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement. The report by UN Climate Change is a synthesis of 154 countries' nationally determined contributions (NDCs) - obligatory submissions under the 2015 Paris deal - received between January 2024 and August 2026, covering 71% of global emissions. It found that if the countries fully implemented their plans and also met conditional targets, emissions cuts would still amount to just 9%. The UN last year estimated a 10% cut by 2035, but that was before a large number of NDCs had come in, leaving it to model the missing pledges, and before the US was taken out of the equation. Under President Donald Trump, the US has left the Paris Agreement for a second time and is pursuing policies that heavily favour fossil fuels. Last week, the United Nations Environment Programme found that global commitments...

The Paris Agreement establishes that Parties’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) will represent a progression, a country’s highest possible ambition (HPA), and an equitable contribution to the collective long-term temperature goal. However, the agreement provides no guidance on how the HPA standard should be interpreted, assessed, or operationalised in practice. In response to this gap, initial scholarship has proposed frameworks to interpret HPA based on the treaty’s text and the wider international environmental law context, which includes the 2025 Advisory Opinion on Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change from the International Court of Justice. Altogether, this has clarified how HPA is part of states’ due diligence obligations and sets the stage for the next challenge: how can the theoretical understanding of HPA be practically applied to assess whether NDCs reflect this norm? Here, we build on existing reporting obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), emerging approaches reflected in the UNFCCC NDC synthesis report, and best practices from the research community. We describe expectations for the process, conduct, presentation, and documentation of NDCs of HPA. These expectations provide qualitative benchmarks and criteria for assessing whether Parties have undertaken a rigorous and reasoned process to identify their highest possible mitigation efforts, and whether the evidence provided is sufficient to make that reasoning open to scrutiny. This promotes transparency and consistency in the formulation and assessment of NDCs, whilst intentionally not assessing targets against quantified mitigation benchmarks. Finally, the proposed expectations are contextualised and illustrated with examples from the latest round of NDC submissions. This practical translation of theoretical obligations can serve as a starting point for a deeper policy conversation on how HPA of NDCs can be evidenced, assessed or challenged.

More than 30 countries have failed to submit an NDC, but only three have repeatedly ignored the committee’s efforts to engage with them

More than 30 countries have failed to submit an NDC, but only three have repeatedly ignored the committee’s efforts to engage with them