Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are climate commitments made by each country that signed the Paris Agreement to help fight climate change through collective action. Simply put, an NDC is a national climate action plan outlining what a country will do based on its unique strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges to reduce the causes of climate change and adapt to its impacts. Every five years, countries submit these plans to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and their progress is reviewed annually to ensure they're following through.

Its development hinges on analysing the situation to first understand a country's position regarding the impacts and causes of climate change, then deciding where it aims to go, using its own resources if it's in the Global North, or with climate financing if it's in the Global South. The initial step in this analysis involves a baseline assessment, which is particularly challenging for Global South countries, where managing and administering various issues, from broad to specific levels, is often disorganised. This leads many Global South nations to rely heavily on secondary data for their NDCs, which in turn makes the Global North hesitant to contribute to climate funds for their implementation. This dynamic forms the core of global climate politics, where those causing climate change and those suffering its effects struggle to agree, with climate........

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