Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa are all committed to meeting the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. Their domestic mitigation efforts focus on implementing their Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC); under the Agreement, these contributions need to be strengthened over time.

However, three main challenges are encountered in the implementation and review of mitigation targets and policies and processes:

• The lack of tools to define transformational long-term strategies for complex sectors such as transport, industry, or agriculture/land-use, which are traditionally poorly represented in existing long-term strategies or policy plans.
• The need to link and support the domestic process of policy development in key sectors, and to ensure that it is consistent with the long-term transformation required by these sectors to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
• The need to have an enhanced societal dialogue to support ambitious climate policy development through empowerment and coordination of national stakeholders.

Long-term low GHG emission development strategies are a crucial tool to inform priority short-term actions with the best transformative impact, both at the country-scale and through international cooperation. Developing these strategies allows actors of the political economy to be engaged in a comprehensive dialogue about the transformation, thereby increasing the mitigation capacity at the national level. If they are connected to international processes, such as stocktake and revision cycles, developing long-term low GHG emission development strategies can also boost international mitigation capacity.

The project

Thanks to the support of the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), IDDRI will lead over three years a consortium bringing together outstanding partners in five emerging economies: CentroClima/COPPE (Brazil), National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation (NCSC) & Tsinghua University (China), Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), Center for Research on Energy Policy of The Institut Teknologi Bandung (CREP-ITB) & the Bogor Agricultural University (CCROM – IPB) (Indonesia), and the Energy Research Center at University of Cape Town (South Africa). The project builds on the community developed through the Deep Decarbonisation Pathways Project and will share methodological insights with members of the 2050 Pathways Platform to support their process of developing long-term strategies.