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Implications of sustainable development considerations for comparability across nationally determined contributions

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 124–129 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

An important component of the Paris Agreement is the assessment of comparability across nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Indeed, game-theory literature on international environmental agreements highlights the need for comparable emission-mitigation efforts by countries to avoid free-riding1. At the same time, there are well-recognized links between mitigation and other national priorities, including but not limited to the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)2,3,4,5,6, which raises the question of how such links might influence comparability assessments. Here, using a global integrated assessment model7, we demonstrate that geographical distributions of the influence of meeting the domestic mitigation component of the NDCs on a subset of the broader SDGs may not align with distributions of effort across NDCs obtained from conventional emissions-based or cost-based comparability metrics8,9,10,11. This implies that comparability assessments would be altered if interactions between mitigation and other SDGs were accounted for. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent to which these distributions differ depends on the degree to which mitigation activities directly affect broader SDGs domestically and indirectly affect international goals, and whether these effects are synergistic or antagonistic. Our analysis provides a foundation for assessing how comparability across NDCs could be better understood in the larger context of sustainability.

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Fig. 1: Summary of contributions of NDCs to climate change mitigation and consequences for other sustainability goals in 2030.
Fig. 2: Comparability across the NDCs based on a subset of emissions- and cost-based metrics.
Fig. 3: Direct effects of the domestic mitigation component of the NDCs on air quality and energy access.
Fig. 4: Direct and indirect effects of the domestic mitigation component of the NDCs on energy security and food security.

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Acknowledgements

The research described in this paper was conducted under the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a multiprogramme national laboratory operated by Battelle for the US Department of Energy. The authors are grateful to K. Riahi of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria for his comments on a previous draft of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, College Park, MD, USA

    Gokul Iyer, Katherine Calvin, Leon Clarke, James Edmonds, Corinne Hartin & Haewon McJeon

  2. School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Nathan Hultman

  3. John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Joseph Aldy

  4. Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    William Pizer

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Contributions

G.I., K.C., L.C. and J.E. designed the research. G.I. wrote the first draft of the paper. C.H. conducted ocean health analysis using the Hector model. All authors contributed to writing the paper.

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Correspondence to Gokul Iyer.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes 1–12, Supplementary Figures 1–2, Supplementary Tables 1–4 and Supplementary References.

Compiled Figure 1

Figure 1 presented in a single panel [This Supplementary file initially published was corrupted and has now been replaced.]

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Iyer, G., Calvin, K., Clarke, L. et al. Implications of sustainable development considerations for comparability across nationally determined contributions. Nature Clim Change 8, 124–129 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0039-z

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