Climatic change: CD-Links special issue on national low-carbon development pathways

One hundred and ninety-three governments adopted the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2015. The agreement foresees, for the near term, a new bottom-up process where countries pledge so-called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025–2030. At the same time, the Paris Agreement defines the longterm objective to hold temperature change to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it further to 1.5 °C. The consistency between the NDCs and the long-term temperature goals is planned to be regularly assessed in global stocktaking exercises as part of the international negotiations.