Getting to the New US Fair Share Nationally Determined Contribution

A Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) is a climate pledge that countries make every five years to maintain or enhance their climate commitments, and the United States is expected to release the NDC for 2025 in November of 2024. What makes a good NDC? That is a complicated question. 

This past year I facilitated a process with dozens of civil society groups from around the United States to develop what an ideal model NDC would look like. This NDC was required to be centered in equity and justice. This meant the NDC needed to take into consideration the US’ historic emissions and the responsibility to act on those emissions in a global context. Additionally, this document needed to recognize the US’ capacity to contribute to addressing climate change given that it is the wealthiest country by GDP in the world. This combination would represent what the US’ fair share of climate action would be. Hence, a Fair Share NDC. 

The Fair Share NDC was released a week before climate week on September 17th. Making its premier at Climate Week in New York, the next step will be to create an advocacy and implementation platform to make this NDC a reality as this document is key to what keeps the world below 1.5℃ warming on average. 

Facilitating the Process

The Fair Share Collaborative, which is made up of the dozens of groups that helped shape the NDC, met on a weekly basis to understand what the science was demanding from the United States. This analysis was completed by the Climate Equity Reference Project. The analysis showed in order for the US to do its fair share, it needed to reduce emissions by 203% below 2005 levels by 2035 and provide climate finance for adaptation and loss and damage. Then the group had to decide how this would be achieved. This is where facilitation was critical. The collaborative had several conversations on how the responsibility should be split between domestic action and international financial support to help developing countries reduce their emissions by the amount that was remaining from domestic action. Since the fair share reduction amount is twice the amount that the US produces, even if all emissions from the US stopped tomorrow, it would be necessary to reduce emissions outside the US because of its historical emissions. Therefore, the collaborative decided to demand a reduction of emissions of 80% below 2005 levels (6 billion metric tons) by 2025 domestically, and climate finance would be provided to developing nations to reach the other 123% (8 billion metric tons). This was after many conversations talking about strategy, what felt achievable, and what this would mean for the US. 

Once the group knew the goals, it was a question of what actions would be necessary to make this happen. Individuals from throughout the climate space provided their expertise on what would be needed to reach these mitigation goals, and wrote their sections accordingly. This was a critical way to engage collaborative partners on laying out how we actually make this happen, and created significant buy-in for the document and process. This included demanding a fossil fuel phase-out by 2031 for a 66% chance of remaining below 1.5 since the US is the largest producer of oil and gas on the planet. From the beginning environmental justice groups were part of writing this document, setting ambitious goals, and articulating the needs from their perspectives, allowing wider coalitions then the previous Fair Share NDC had once it was complete. 

The secondary portion of creating this document was to agree on how we would ask, frame, and suggest the US deliver on the climate finance necessary to meet these goals in a way that is equitable and just. This was a more challenging conversation than domestic emission reduction because there are so many different elements to international climate finance. First, the collaborative needed to center those who are most impacted by climate change and create a space where they could articulate their demands and needs. The group held special sessions to hear from Demand Climate Justice leaders from developing nations about their strategy around climate finance, and what we needed to do to uphold and honor those needs. The collaborative ended up using the cost per ton reduction of the Green Climate Fund to determine how much mitigation funding was required at minimum, which was $106 billion annually by 2030. For the amount of finance that needed to be paid for adaptation and loss and damage, the collaborative took the minimum amount of funding needed based on conservative needs assessments on climate impacts, which was $340 billion annually by 2030, for a total of $446 billion. The collaborative also wanted to make it clear that this money would not be raised on the poor or the middle class of the United States, but on the rich and the polluters that have created this problem and have benefited the most economically. This is all nuanced, but the language was intentional to make sure everyone could accept where we ended up in decision making. Making sure individuals feel heard and that their feedback is incorporated is also a value I bring to spaces I facilitate, and it makes them more successful overall. 

Project Management

Once the big decisions were agreed upon and made, it was time to make sure the document was produced and finished in a timely manner. I contacted individuals that needed to provide content to the document, and then contacted individuals that needed to be consulted about the content. Deadlines were articulated clearly. There was also an understood agreement that if individuals did not comment or provide feedback by those deadlines, then they were inherently accepting the content and text of the document. Using this method, the collaborative was able to move forward on various components of the document. 

In the last week of the project, editing access had been removed from collaborative members so that a final editing process could take place. It was read through and edited by 4 individuals to make sure that issues were caught with the document. Then it was sent out for a final review from collaborative members to make sure the edits did not alter the intention of their writing. 

Once the due date was passed, we knew we had a final product ready for design and we were able to get endorsements for the framework as a whole.

All in all this labor of love took around 11 months from start to finish, and that is just the beginning. Now is time to advocate!