As the world grapples with how to tackle climate change, countries that signed the Paris Agreement outline their commitments to reduce emissions in documents called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). These are official climate action plans that each country submits to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) every five years, detailing their reduction targets and strategies for achieving them. A cornerstone of the Paris Agreement, NDCs are designed to track global progress and encourage increasingly ambitious climate action over time. While they are often scrutinized for their emissions targets, new research suggests they contain much more – revealing countries’ broader priorities, challenges and approaches to sustainability.
Our team, which included researchers from ESCP Business School and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, applied methods from computational linguistics – which uses machine learning to analyze text – to over 300 NDCs submitted by nations worldwide. Our study identified 21 key topics within the documents, which we grouped into seven broader themes including development, mitigation targets, and impacts of climate change.
