US commits to 61% emissions cut by 2035: What does its updated NDC plan say?

The new target for 2035 has been disclosed in the updated Nationally Determined Contribution, or NDC, that the US submitted to the UN Climate Change on Thursday (December 19) night. The 2015 Paris Agreement asks every country to periodically prepare and submit their plans for climate action. The first round of NDCs contained climate targets that countries intended to achieve by 2030. The second round of NDCs, for 2035, are now due, and have to be submitted by February next year.

US officials said the 2035 target would likely be achieved even if Trump scaled back on climate action during his term. That is because bulk of the actions needed to achieve the target had already been set in motion, with private industry having committed to hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy investments.

Trump is widely expected to pull out of the Paris Agreement once again, just as he had done in his first presidency. He has also promised to allow fresh investments in fossil fuel industry to drill more oil and gas from domestic sources, and been critical of the incentives offered to the electric vehicles industry, among others.

“The United States met and surpassed its 2020 target of net economy-wide emissions reductions in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels, its initial Paris Agreement target set in 2015. The United States is also in a strong position to achieve its target of 50-52 percent emissions reductions below 2005 levels in 2030… Furthermore, under current policies, US emissions are projected to fall up to 57 percent from 2005 levels by 2035,” the US said in its NDC.

“This communication’s 2035 target of reducing net economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 61-66 percent below 2005 levels in 2035 increases our ambition,” it said.

Fair and ambitious?

The US also claimed that its 2035 target was the “highest level of ambition possible” and was consistent with the requirement of keeping global rise in temperature to within 1.5 degree Celsius from pre-industrial times.

“The target falls within the range of U.S.-specific pathways to global 1.5°C warming included in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report. It keeps the United States on a straight line or steeper path to achieve its long-term strategy goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, economy-wide, by no later than 2050. Moreover, the target is consistent with the global trajectory set out in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report for limiting global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot,” it said.

Under the international climate change framework, developed countries like the US are supposed to take the major share of responsibility of dealing with climate change. They are expected to make bigger emission cuts, and also provide assistance, through provision of finance and technology, to the developing countries to help them adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global emissions must fall 43 per cent below 2019 levels by 2030 to keep alive any hopes of meeting the 1.5 degree Celsius target.

The 50-52 per cent reductions that US is aiming to achieve by 2030 on 2005 levels translates to barely 46 per cent over 2019 levels. That is because the US emissions in 2019 were higher than in 2005. A 46 per cent reduction is just about what the world as a whole needs to do by 2030. For a fair and equitable share of responsibilities, developed countries, particularly the US, which has the largest share of historical emissions, needed to cut their emissions by a much higher amount to ensure that the developing countries don’t have to do as much.

Analysis by Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an independent scientific project that measures progress towards the 1.5 and 2 degree Celsius temperature targets mentioned in the Paris Agreement, shows that the US must be aiming for 62-65 per cent reductions by 2030 from 2005 levels for it to be compatible with 1.5 degree Celsius trajectory. But this is something that US has now revealed it wants to achieve only by 2035.

No finance

There is no mention of climate finance in the US NDC for 2035. Developed countries are under an obligation to provide money to the developing countries but there is no explicit requirement on them to mention their financial commitments in the NDCs.

Mobilisation of financial resources is being done through a separate process and, as of now, there is no standardised accounting system to keep track of these financial flows, which happens through a multitude of channels. The only official source of consolidated climate finance being mobilised by developed countries is a report published annually by the Ogranisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of these very same developed nations. The figures presented in these reports is often contested by the developing countries and civil society organisations.

Just like on emissions reductions, the US has had a very modest performance on climate finance. In 2021, it contributed just 1.5 billion dollars, which increased to 5.8 billion dollars in 2022. Last month, the US State Department said in a statement that the country had raised 9.5 billion dollars in 2023 and was on track to deliver about 11 billion dollars this year.

Even these figures would suggest that the US was contributing only about 10 per cent of the total climate finance mobilised, whereas its share of historical emissions is more than 25 per cent.

Coming just after the COP29 meeting in Baku where the developed countries agreed to triple their current annual financial obligations from 100 billion dollars to 300 billion dollars by 2035, it was expected that the US NDC for 2035 would include plans to raise additional money but that did not happen.

The European Union also did not mention any finance targets in its previous NDC, but it did reiterate that it was working towards making finance flows consistent with low greenhouse gas emission and climate resilient development pathways. It had said that revenues from its carbon market and measures such as EU Sustainable Finance Framework would help it raise additional resources.

Many developing countries do include climate finance in their NDCs, mentioning the estimates of the money they require to carry out their climate action plans. It were these estimates that became the foundation for the demand that the 100 billion dollar per year figure be revised to at least one trillion dollars a year. However, that demand was turned down during the negotiations in Baku last month, and now the developed countries have committed to a figure of 300 billion dollars a year from 2035.