Briefing Paper

Intended Nationally Determined Contributions as a Means to Strengthening Africa’s Engagement in International Climate Negotiations

“Countries will be meeting in Paris, France in December 2015 to agree on a new global climate ‘protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force’ to go into effect in the year 20201. This will be a culmination of negotiations on a global climate agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol that formally begun in the Ad-Hoc
Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) under the multilateral United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The new global climate agreement may for the first time include legal obligations for emerging, developing and least developed countries. This will implicitly have a profound impact on the international climate regime after this agreement. It is in this context that this policy brief seeks to analyse how African countries – which largely fall into the developing and least developed countries envision their engagement in this new climate regime through their submitted national commitments, and also identifies how
these countries can strategically and constructively engage in this regime going forward.”