Impact

ACHIEVE aims to address critical gaps in knowledge and substantially enhance the state of the art to ensure effective and high-integrity voluntary climate action. ACHIEVE responds to two important developments in climate change mitigation:

• First, in the Paris Agreement, countries have agreed to limit the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. Yet with only few years left to 2030, governments’ combined efforts under the Paris Agreement fall far short of the Paris goals; and national governments are not anticipated to fully achieve their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). According to the recent IPCC Synthesis Report, emissions have to be cut by around half by 2030 to reach the goals in the Paris Agreement.
• Second, recent years have seen an unprecedented number of net-zero and other climate actions announced by a wide array of non-state and subnational actors, including businesses, financial institutions and investors, industrial associations, civil society, cities, and other subnational authorities (here referred to as ‘non-state actors’). The Global Climate Action Portal administered by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat currently records over 30,000 of such commitments. If such voluntary climate action does not substitute but complements, governmental action, it can inspire more ambitious regulations and policies.

Apart from contributing to UNFCCC processes, ACHIEVE activities have been planned to feed into other external processes from the EU and other stakeholders (see figure for more details).

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