The Global Stocktake

When countries ratified the Paris Agreement they committed to limit end-of-century global warming to well below 2°C and pursue 1.5°C (UNFCCC, 2015). This requires that global greenhouse gas emissions peak before 2025 and decline thereafter (IPCC, 2022). However, emissions have not yet peaked and are unlikely to peak in the coming decade under the currently adopted policies (UNEP, 2022).

Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are documents prepared by countries to outline their contributions to the goals of the Paris Agreement. Under the Agreement, countries must update their NDCs every five years to increase their ambition and reflect evolving global climate change mitigation goals (UNFCCC, 2015).

The Global Stocktake (Figure 2) process assesses countries’ collective progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and informs them on how to enhance ambition and cooperation (UNFCCC, 2015). The first Global Stocktake takes place between 2021 and 2023 and aims to inform NDCs to be submitted in 2025.

We propose that the GST uses performance distributions in the assessment of progress. These fulfil the goals of the Global Stocktake because they show collective progress using anonymised information from countries, while showing that not all countries are the same (Jeffery and Nascimento, 2022).

Visit the UNFCCC website for more information about the Global Stocktake process.