EXPLAINER: What are NDCs and why are they so important in fighting climate change? - GMA Network

The Philippines has finally updated its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), recommitting a total of 75% of emissions reduction and adjusting its unconditional emissions reduction targets from 2.1% to 7% with the remaining 68% are conditional. This is all for the period of 2025-2035.

But what are NDCs and why do they matter?

Essentially, NDCs are climate action plans that each of the 195 countries that signed on to the Paris Agreement is required to submit to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) every five years.

Countries need to update their NDCs every five years because the idea is for every signatory to raise its climate ambition and be able to keep up with the goal of limiting warming to 1.5C.

"Together these climate actions determine whether the world achieves the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement," the UNFCCC said on its website.

In case a reminder is needed: the Paris Agreement is the legally binding treaty with the goal of limiting "'the increase in global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels' and pursue efforts 'to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.'"

It's been hailed as a monumental triumph for people and the planet.

1.5C is not an arbitrary number. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body for assessing climate science, crossing 1.5C "risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves, and rainfall."

Underneath it all is preventing unnecessary loss of resources, the loss of lives, and keeping a habitable earth.

So consider extreme weather events like Super El Niño, the simultaneous typhoons that the Philippines experienced in 2024, and even the heat waves and polar vortex in the west. Notice we are getting more of these extreme events? That's because climate is changing and Earth is getting cooked.

Earlier in the month, the United Nations Environment Program released a study that said the world is going to overshoot 1.5C, with the best case scenario now pegged at 1.8C.

First of all, let's get our vocab down pat. Limiting warming to 1.5C is called mitigation, as in to stop or reduce something harmful or unpleasant.

In climate, mitigation specifically means "efforts to reduce emissions and enhance sinks."

That implies planting more trees and increasing forest covers (forests and trees are considered carbon sinks because they sequester carbon from the atmosphere).

But the more effective manner to limit warming is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from entering the atmosphere.

GHG — like the carbon dioxide from our cars, the smoke from burning fossil fuels for energy and electricity, and methane from agriculture and livestock — is what traps heat and warms the planet. This is the main culprit for climate change.

The UN calls the NDCs "the heart of the Paris Agreement" because they hold each country's commitment as well as its strategies and action plans to achieve that commitment.

For the Philippines, we are looking to cut our emissions by 75%, increasing the unconditional commitment to 7% — or emissions we plan to cut on our own — and the remaining 68% as conditional or reliant on international help.

It's not easy nor cheap to reduce GHG emissions. Yes, we can improve our carbon sinks — plant trees and expand our forests — but as many experts have already said, we cannot plant our way out of this crisis.

Reducing GHG emissions requires transitioning to renewable energy, electrification of vehicles, better public transport, and improved agricultural emissions and waste management.

Thankfully, it's also in our updated NDC, which says emissions reduction will cover energy, transport, agriculture, waste, and forestry and other land use sectors, as well as industrial processes and product use, reflecting "an economy-wide scope in determining overall addition and consistency with national greenhouse gas inventory arrangements."

A caveat: As highlighted by Gerry Arances of the Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development (CEED), the updated NDC doesn't mention phasing out fossil fuels.

Anna Reyes of Sustina drives the point further: "the word 'coal' does not appear anywhere in the NDC document." That's a very important point because as of 2023, coal is the most dominant energy source in the Philippines.

According to the United Nations, "fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — are by far the largest contributor to global climate change."

They have been very useful to our daily lives: they provide electricity that powers our homes and businesses, factories and office buildings, as well as gas for our cars, and buses, and planes. Shipping — and we're doing a lot of this from online shopping — is also powered by fossil fuels.

Even plastic is made from fossil fuels — and we know how inevitable plastics have become to our lives; it's its own type of pollution.

But with plastic already polluting even the depths of the ocean, extreme weather events occurring more frequently, sea level rise and melting glaciers: Isn't it time to be more serious about cutting emissions?

It's an important question to ask, especially by the Philippines because despite not being a major global emitter — the country only emitted a total of 175 million tonnes of CO2 in 2024, or just 0.45% of the world's CO2 emissions of the same year, according to Our World in Data — we remain among the most vulnerable to climate change. — VBL/CDC, GMA News