The World Can’t Wait: Climate Targets Must Match the Urgency of the Moment

2025 marks a potential turning point in the efforts to combat climate change. This year, nearly every country should announce climate targets for 2035. These climate targets, known as nationally determined contributions (NDC), will determine whether we secure a livable future for birds, humans and the ecosystems we share, or if our fragile Earth risks being pushed toward catastrophe.

These 2035 goals are required under the 2015 Paris Agreement. While the United States has announced it will withdraw from the Paris Agreement, nearly every other country remains a member, or Party, to the Agreement and supportive of its aims. Audubon calls on all nations to set science-based, ambitious NDC targets aligned with a goal of net zero emissions around midcentury, including the follow through to create real plans, policies, and the financing strategies to achieve them.

Audubon recognizes that combatting climate change and advancing conservation throughout the hemisphere are critical to “bending the bird curve,” or reversing the massive decline in bird populations witnessed over the past 50 years. And these climate and conservation imperatives intersect with the implementation and achievement of ambitious NDCs. 

Building on the Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement was a landmark step forward, requiring countries to set successively stronger NDC targets every five years. This helps meet a collective goal of striving to keep global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, beyond which the effects of climate change are expected to be increasingly severe, for birds and humans.

Key for making this happen, is reducing net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in a straight-line path to the zero net emissions goal by midcentury.

Countries such as Brazil, Norway and the United Kingdom already announced 2035 targets that are consistent with limiting future temperature increases to 1.5°C. Yet many major emitters have not, and others have targets that are insufficiently ambitious. The current pledges put the world woefully short of the ambitious climate action needed to keep the world safe for people and birds. (Official NDC submissions can be found here; Climate Watch provides a useful summary of the NDC targets.)

This month United Nations Secretary General António Guterres is expected to call on all countries to announce maximally ambitious NDC targets. These 2035 NDCs will be spotlighted at the UN Climate Conference COP30 in November.

Ambitious, Actionable Climate Targets

Audubon joins the Group of Least Developed Countries, the We Mean Business Coalition, the GZero group of countries, and many other stakeholders in calling for those countries that have not done so to announce 1.5°C-aligned NDC targets in September. More specifically, we request countries to:

• Set 2035 NDC targets aligned with a 1.5°C future. To protect birds, people and ecosystems, 2035 climate targets for each country need to meet net-zero emissions goals by midcentury, a trajectory science tells us is most likely for limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C by the end of this century. This, in turn, is needed to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.  
• Design robust implementation plans. A target is only meaningful if it’s achievable. Governments and stakeholders must outline clear strategies for achieving their 2035 targets, including the acceleration of clean energy transitions, and expansion of natural climate solutions that can result in conserving and restoring the ecosystems that help reduce climate change and serve as important bird habitat. Audubon’s Flight Plan captures the importance of both natural climate solutions and renewable energy for ensuring a healthy planet.
• Ensure financing matches the ambition. Ambitious targets need real investment. Implementation strategies must include robust financing and investment plans. These strategies should reflect a range of financing options, including domestic and international funding, clean energy support, resilient infrastructure development, land restoration programs, sustainable agriculture practices, and more. Technical assistance should be available for helping structure proposals to ensure they are bankable.
• Integrate national priorities for broader impact. Climate action works best when it aligns with other national goals, ranging from energy security and agricultural resilience to biodiversity conservation. NDC implementation strategies can include consideration of how priority areas from the National Strategy for the Conservation of Birds overlap with key carbon sinks, how to meet energy security goals through zero-emission energy sources, or how national REDD+ forest data can improve NDC monitoring baselines.

The 2035 NDCs may be the last real opportunity to put the world on a trajectory to a safer, more stable future. With bold commitments and sustained action, their implementation could help advance large-scale conservation across the hemisphere, and the world.

We share a single, fragile planet with nearly 8 billion people, and billions of birds that remind us each day of the beauty and power of nature, and collective action. Yet our shifting climate threatens the health of this planet. The countries of the world have the chance in 2025 to set a course correction, and to put all of us on a path that is safer for people and for birds. We need to lift our voices together to call for ambitious NDCs that provide hope for a livable planet.