Ricardo joins the NDC Partnership to support climate change action

The NDC Partnership is a global coalition of countries and institutions collaborating to drive transformational climate action through sustainable development based Nationally Determined Contributions (or NDCs) – each country's strategy to cut its own greenhouse gas emissions and build resiliency against the negative effects of a changing climate.

Ricardo’s climate change experts have been supporting countries in meeting their obligations under the Paris Agreement for many years. In 2014 and 2015 the company supported over 15 countries to develop their initial NDCs in advance of the Paris climate conference in late 2015. In 2016 Ricardo’s experts developed a key resource for operationalising a country’s climate change commitments, ‘the NDC implementation quick-start guide’, which has subsequently been used by countries to put their NDCs into practice.

Ricardo’s renewed commitment in joining the NDC Partnership comes at a prescient time for the international efforts to limit the negative effects of climate change. A landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report in 2018 showed that whilst the current NDCs that countries submitted previously will reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions below what would have otherwise been expected, they do not put the world on a path to the Paris Agreement goal of restricting global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to one and half degrees. The report also showed that the window for acting on this is narrowing. The Paris Agreement requires countries to update their NDCs every five years and the first opportunity to do so is next year; the next 12 months will therefore be critical for collective global action to tackle GHG emissions.

“The Ricardo climate change team is hugely excited to become part of the NDC Partnership,” commented James Harries, Ricardo’s NDC lead. “Ricardo has been at the forefront of work under the Paris Agreement to develop, implement and now update the NDCs of countries around the world, and we look forward to working closely with the Partnership, especially over the next year as we move towards the UN climate change summit, COP26, to be hosted in Glasgow in November 2020.”

Pablo Vieira, global director of the NDC Partnership Support Unit, added: “Our members leverage their resources and expertise to provide countries with the tools they need to implement their NDCs and combat climate change to build a better future. We are pleased to add Ricardo to our growing membership base, their rich and varied experience will help us deliver our commitment to transformational climate action.”

Joining the NDC Partnership complements Ricardo’s core environmental work around supporting countries and sub-national governments in a range of sustainability areas, including renewable energy, sustainable transport, resource efficiency and air quality, and helping to mitigate GHG emissions and create a low carbon future.