Interpreting Emission Pledges: the need for a Common Accounting Framework

This paper aims to clarify the meaning of current national emission pledges, in ways that can facilitate efforts to understand their implications and aid comparison. It builds upon the paper Comparability of effort by Annex I Parties: an overview of issues. That paper outlined the difficulty of establishing ‘comparability’ among countries’ pledges and introduced a new approach based upon trajectories to 2050; it also underlined the difficulty of understanding some of the current pledges. This paper provides a more detailed analysis of what has been pledged and it suggests options for improving transparency in understanding the implications.