NDC Explorer

indc

ndc

About NDC Explorer

What is the NDC Explorer?
The NDC Explorer is an online tool to analyse and compare countries' (Intended) Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs/NDCs). It is based solely on information in these documents. Get more information on the project and its relevant publications or watch the introduction video!

What are the (Intended) Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)?
In 2013, the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) decided that every member state would submit an 'Intended Nationally Determined Contribution' (INDC). Countries based their INDCs on their specific national priorities, circumstances, and capabilities. The INDCs proved to be a cornerstone to reach the Paris Agreement. Every party that ratifies the Paris Agreement is invited to turn its INDC into a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) (see decision 1/CP.21, §22).
First and foremost, (I)NDCs intend to increase the ambition to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, by outlining countries ‘contributions’. However, most countries also use the opportunity to write about other priorities and ambitions, such as adaptation and finance needs. Countries also used their (I)NDC to highlight other important issues, such as fossil fuel subsidy reform or linkages to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Aim of the NDC Explorer
The NDC Explorer has two aims. First, it provides a neutral, sophisticated and user-friendly lens to analyse and compare both qualitative and quantitative (I)NDC content.
Second, the NDC Explorer stimulates the debate on content, scope as well as formulation and implementation processes of the national climate action plans. In doing so, it supports policy makers in formulating improved and more ambitious NDCs in 2020 and thereafter (see 1/CP.21, §23).

Subcategories, legends and analysis
According to Mbeva and Pauw, 2016, the UNFCCC guidance for INDC formulation (see decision 1/CP.20, § 10-17) was very limited and undear. (I)NDCs thus vary greatly in terms of structure, content, scope, level of detail, and metrics used. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to fit all (I)NDCs under one subcategory with exclusive legend items (countries can only fall under one legend item). Wherever possible, we added legend items for (I)NDCs who provided more details.
For example, we demarcate mitigation as 'focus areas' when (I)NDCs 1) explicitly highlights and/or prioritises this sector; 2) and/or underlines the sector’s mitigation potential among other sectors; 3) and/or prioritises investments in this sector. Furthermore, we therefore added country-specific information in many subcategories.
The tool also allows for comparison across subcategories. For example, there are 7 subcategories on mitigation sectors which have exactly the same legend; and under adaptation we illustrate the 5 most frequently mentioned climate risks, vulnerabilities, and priority sectors across INDCs.

Thorough and strict analysis
The team aimed to be as factual as possible and to avoid interpretations of (I)NDCs. This meant we sometimes had to exclude countries from certain legend items if they did not refer to certain concepts explicitly (such as REDD+ or SDGs and their expansions), but only described related issues or plans instead. The same accounts for sectors (e.g. derivatives of ‘agriculture’ or ‘transport’). In other cases, we identified information in particular sections, such as ‘planning process’ or ‘fairness and ambition’. We focused on the (I)NDC contributions until 2030.
The NDC Explorer is solely based on information communicated by Parties to the UNFCCC in their INDCs/NDCs. The dataset was jointly established by the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) and Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in cooperation with the UNFCCC secretariat. The Frankfurt School - UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance joined the consortium in 2018.

Country groups
The regional and income-level country groups are based on the World Bank Country Groups. Additional groups are available for the bar graph menu only, because the groups (e.g. the G20 and the OECD, or SIDS and LDCs are not mutually exclusive.

Suggestions for improvement
The project team did a careful data analysis, but cannot guarantee that there are no mistakes made. In case you come across any inconsistencies, please contact us.

Developed by
The project and research was led by Pieter Pauw (DIE) and supported by Davide Cassanmagnano (independent consultant), Kennedy Mbeva (ACTS), Jonas Hein, Alejandro Guarin, Clara Brandi (all DIE), Adis Dzebo, Kevin Adams, Aaron Atteridge, Nella Canales (all SEI), Thomas Bock, Joana Helms, Alina Zalewski, Ezra Frommé, Anika Lindener and Dilsham Muhammad (all DIE) as well as colleagues from the UNFCCC secretariat.
Sönke Kreft and Eike Behre of the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII) contributed the subcategory "Climate risk insurance" in October 2017.
Guy Cunliffe and Harald Winkler of the Energy Research Centre (ERC) of the University of Cape Town contributed the subcategory "Global temperature target" in October 2018. Find a publication on the original data here.
In September 2019, the subcategory "Fossil fuel production" has been added. This project was led by Cleo Verkuijl, Natalie Jones, and Michael Lazarus (Stockholm Environment Institute), and supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida. Data on countries' fossil fuel production was obtained from the International Energy Agency World Energy Balances (Edition 2018), which considers country data for 2016. A 2019 Stockholm Environment Institute working paper conducts a similar analysis for the NDCs of the 57 of the world's biggest fossil fuel producers, finding that countries are making only limited use of the potential of NDCs to help in the wind-down of oil, gas and coal production.

The NDC Explorer is a contribution to the NDC Partnership Knowledge Portal and was financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and additional financial contributions by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the Swedish Research Council Formas.

Download Data
The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) holds the copyright to the NDC Explorer and the database that it is based on. Both are licenced under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. You are free to download and use the data following the conditions of this licence. Go to the downloads.

Suggested citation
Pauw, W.P, Cassanmagnano, D., Mbeva, K., Hein, J., Guarin, A., Brandi, C., Dzebo, A., Canales, N., Adams, K.M., Atteridge, A., Bock, T., Helms, J., Zalewski, A., Frommé. E., Lindener, A., Muhammad, D. (2016). NDC Explorer. German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). DOI: 10.23661/ndc_explorer_2017_2.0

Download data

You are warmly invited to download and use the data of the NDC Explorer under the following conditions. The data is licenced under CC BY 4.0. If you share, copy and redistribute the material you must give appropriate credit (name creator, copyright notice, licence notice and a link to the material). If you remix, transform or build upon the material you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original, and indicate the changes you have made.

Please consider that the underlying data is updated on a regular basis, e.g. with new NDCs releases. Therefore, please state the date of your download when referring to the data.

The last update of the data was:

March 18, 2020

Below you find three types of files: three plain text table files (comma-separated csv, tab-separated tsv, semicolon-separated ssv), one JSON and one XML meta description.

If you are a researcher or practitioner, you might make the most use of the CSV/TSV/SSV files which include the data of the INDCs, the NDCs and the defined legend items, and can be and can be opened by most spreadsheet software. We advise you to use an open calculator software and to check the data formatting carefully when opening the first time.

© German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)

Suggested citation:

Pauw, W.P, Cassanmagnano, D., Mbeva, K., Hein, J., Guarin, A., Brandi, C., Dzebo, A., Canales, N., Adams, K.M., Atteridge, A., Bock, T., Helms, J., Zalewski, A., Frommé. E., Lindener, A., Muhammad, D. (2016). NDC Explorer. German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). DOI: 10.23661/ndc_explorer_2017_2.0

Contact: klimalog@die-gdi.de

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