What is climate ambition and what is its objective?

FAQS about the Climate Ambition

FAQs-about-Climate-Ambition-Website-SGK-PLANET-Sandor-Alejandro-Gerendas-Kiss–T

1. What is climate ambition and what is its objective?

Climate ambition refers to the contribution that each country can or is willing to make at the national level to achieve the overall objective of the Paris Agreement. The main goal is to prevent the temperature from exceeding 2ºC from its pre-industrial level, lowered to 1.5ºC, following the recommendation of the Fifth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in October 2018.

On the other hand, each country sovereignly defines the level of ambition to which it is committed. Something that has been called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) total of individual actions necessary to achieve the overall objective.

Article 3 of the Paris Agreement requires that such actions be “ambitious”, “that they represent progress over time” and be established “to achieve the purpose of this Agreement”. Definitions that do not force countries to something tangible, and rather it seems a wish list. However, the efforts being made by the UN to provide developing countries with the procedures and technologies for monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of them must be recognized.

In conclusion: the overall objective of the Paris Agreement is subordinated to the totality of all individual climate ambitions. These, in theory, should be enough to curb global warming of the planet and prevent climate change from becoming uncontrollable, to the point of affecting the lives of numerous species on Earth, including Homo sapiens.