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Fossil fuel production must wind down significantly to achieve the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goals. The climate community, however, has given little attention to how countries have addressed fossil fuel production in national communications to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
This report remedies this gap by reviewing nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and long-term low-emissions development strategies (LT-LEDS) countries submitted under the UNFCCC.
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The United Nations climate change process has historically avoided paying explicit attention to fossil fuel production, in part due to deliberate strategies employed by large fossil-fuel-producing states to keep this topic off the international climate agenda. Nevertheless, there is increasing consensus that meeting Paris Agreement temperature targets while avoiding an unnecessarily abrupt and disruptive transition away from fossil fuels requires governments to plan for a managed decline in fossil fuel production.
NDCs and LT-LEDS are key documents through which governments can communicate their climate change plans within the UNFCCC process, allowing states to signal their climate action intentions and priorities internationally. The analyses in this paper reveal that governments have not yet sufficiently used the potential of NDCs and LT-LEDS to communicate plans and targets supporting a transition away from fossil fuels.
This report provides the first full analysis of how countries are addressing fossil fuel production in their NDCs and LT-LEDS submitted under the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC up to 15 March 2023. The authors conclude by detailing four ways governments can increase transparency in their fossil fuel production plans.
You can download the researchers’ full dataset on NDCs and LT-LEDS here. Updated as of March 2023.
Media coverage / A new SEI study shows while fossil fuels are increasingly mentioned climate plans, those who will continue to extract far outnumber those who will wind it down.
Natalie Jones
Initiative / The Carbon Lock-In Initiative seeks to uncover and address the barriers that uphold the fossil fuel-based economy.
Past event / SEI will participate in a side event at the Bonn Climate Change Conference (SB 58) presenting analysis, comparison and results on countries’ NDCs
Other publication / The 2021 report reveals that countries' fossil fuel production plans remain dangerously out of sync with the limits consistent with the Paris Agreement.
SEI working paper / This analysis finds that a growing number of countries are addressing fossil fuels as part of their climate mitigation activities.
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