54 COM/ENV/EPOC/IEA/SLT(2020)4/REV2
5 Links between COVID-19 recovery and NDCs
As well as their economic impacts, governments’ COVID-19 recovery measures will affect (positively or negatively) current and future GHG emissions levels, as well as other aspects of people’s well-being. Establishing COVID-19 recovery measures is therefore an opportunity for countries to review a broad set of domestic policy goals, and ensure that they are aligned with one another, and along different time frames. This will help improve the effectiveness of policy implementation. Several governments have in fact introduced some measures to “green” their COVID-19recovery (see e.g. (OECD, 2020[160])). Thus, the impact of COVID-19 recovery measures can affect the ability of a country to meet its current NDC, the ambition of the current and future NDCs, as well as the feasibility of achieving longer-term lowemissions development. The schedule agreed in the Paris Agreement for countries to communicate or update their NDCs also means that countries are doing so at the same time as developing their recovery measures. The pandemic and steps to recover from it can impact NDCs in multiple ways. These are discussed below and include:
Ambition of current NDCs: the mitigation ambition of current NDCs can be affected by the form of the NDC, the depth and length of the economic downturn as well as the speed and pace of recovery in activities and emissions in the short term.
Resources available to implement and update NDCs: the pandemic will affect the level of public and private funding available, including to implement climate responses, as well as domestic processes to update NDCs, e.g. collect and process data and information and undertake coordination with stakeholders.
Recovery measures can hinder domestic policy alignment, e.g. between climate and other policy priorities. This may affect a country’s policy coherence overall and longer-term climate ambition, e.g. as outlined in future NDCs.
COVID-19 containment and recovery measures can impact the ambition of current NDCs The impact of the containment measures put in place as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic can impact the stringency of some current NDC targets (particularly for those countries with multi-year targets running to 2025). In the absence of a full and rapid bounce back of activities, the drop in GHG emissions during the crisis may mean that some current NDCs are now less challenging than originally anticipated. This is particularly so if the NDC runs only to 2025, was developed on a “deviation from BAU” basis where the BAU level is static (rather than dynamic), or are for countries where key emission sources are in sectors that have been particularly badly hit by the response measures to the pandemic. In such cases, the impact of the climate response actions taken by governments will be conflated with the reduction in emission and activity levels caused by containment or recovery measures.
Unclassified
