NDCs lie at the core of the Paris Agreement, capturing each country’s commitments to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change.
The third generation of submissions, known as NDCs 3.0, marked climate efforts in 2025. Informed by the outcomes of the first global stocktake, these NDC updates had to demonstrate clear progression and greater ambition, offering what may be one of the last opportunities to align global emissions with the 1.5°C goal.
In this context, ICAT intensified efforts to ensure countries are equipped with the data, tools and capacity needed for more ambitious, evidence-based NDCs.
Across its portfolio in 2025, ICAT supported countries at different stages of their NDC 3.0 submissions:
ICAT’s regional Hubs complemented these efforts by equipping countries with practical tools and methodologies to use transparency for NDC 3.0 preparation. Notably, the Central African Hub provided training on the Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Model (GACMO) tool, enabling governments to develop emissions projection scenarios that many have since applied in their national processes in developing their NDC 3.0.
Together, these efforts strengthened transparency, institutional capacity and evidence-based planning across regions, helping to lay the groundwork for more credible and ambitious NDC 3.0 submissions. The improved quality of NDCs 3.0 was widely acknowledged, and, clearly, transparency played an important role in achieving this.
The ICAT support for NDCs in two countries, Chile and Kyrgyzstan, demonstrates how targeted action to boost transparency and strengthen institutions can directly enable more ambitious climate action.
In Chile, climate change has long been a matter of national policy. The country has progressively adapted its NDCs and climate policies in a drive to strengthen its approach to climate action and management.
Building on targets set in 2020, Chile’s NDC 3.0 establishes a more ambitious 2030–2035 carbon budget while maintaining all existing targets. Chile now aims to reach 80 per cent renewable energy by 2030, alongside new goals for transport, methane emissions and short-lived climate pollutants. New to the NDC 3.0, Chile will require all municipalities and regions to have climate change plans that are adapted to their local realities, while the central government will strengthen their capacities. The government of Chile has also increased its ambition on adaptation and on the social pillar of a just ecological transition.
With ICAT support, Chile has strengthened the focus on integration measures—actions that simultaneously support mitigation and adaptation—in its NDC 3.0. In one valuable lesson, the project helped clarify that integration is not absolute but exists on a spectrum: from measures that only reduce emissions, to actions with some shared benefits, to projects that maximize their contribution to both mitigation and adaptation. This understanding is valuable for designing effective projects and classifying actions for international financing.
ICAT also helped to strengthen governance by clarifying how monitoring of the integration measures is carried out, who implements them and where responsibilities lie. This included identifying roles within organizations responsible for NDC implementation and improved operational planning. The initiative was notably successful in protected areas: Chile has been ambitious in expanding protected areas, but the project identified a gap in effective management. This led to a new target, strengthening both management and financing.
ICAT support has helped to enable collaboration between mitigation and adaptation teams, which traditionally operated Chile’s separately. As Andrés Pica Téllez, Head of the Climate Change Division at the Ministry of Environment, explained: “Creating an integration area is not enough. The work must be collaborative and integrated.”
Chile’s commitment to transparency underpins its entire approach. “No target is ambiguous: each one has clear indicators and means of verification,” noted Pica Téllez. The country produces annual assessments of NDC progress and national climate change action reports, along with biennial transparency reports, covering 345 municipal and regional plans.
Chile’s experience demonstrates how transparency tools and institutional strengthening can enable more ambitious, coherent climate action and could become a model for other countries seeking to integrate mitigation and adaptation in their climate action.
Kyrgyzstan is among the countries with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions levels—its share amounts to just 0.034 per cent of global emissions. Yet the country is highly vulnerable to climate change impacts: temperatures in Central Asia are rising almost twice as fast as the global average, posing threats to food security, water resources and hydropower potential. NDC 3.0 commits Kyrgyzstan to reducing net greenhouse emissions by 18 per cent unconditionally, or by 30 per cent with international support, from projected baseline levels by 2030. By 2035, these targets become 16 per cent unconditionally and 39 per cent conditionally. Achieving these goals depends on robust transparency systems.
The ICAT project was designed to support Kyrgyzstan in developing and institutionalizing frameworks for greenhouse gas emissions projections coupled with an NDC tracking framework in the energy sector. As a result of the project, the country now has a framework for building and regularly updating greenhouse gas emissions projections, expert and institutional capacity and tools to perform impact assessment of selected policies and measures, and an NDC tracking framework for the energy sector that is essential for tracking progress against climate targets. The project also developed recommendations for the agriculture, forestry and other land use sectors related to projections and NDC tracking.
Stakeholder engagement was central to the project’s approach. Workshops brought together representatives from government agencies, the scientific community and civil society to collect data, input it into the GACMO tool, and validate results. Hands-on training enabled participants to develop skills in using GACMO for greenhouse gas emissions projections in the energy and transport sectors. This participatory approach strengthened both the quality of data and the credibility of the resulting frameworks.
The outcomes of this work directly informed Kyrgyzstan’s sectoral NDC 3.0 targets, demonstrating how improved transparency systems can support the government to define more ambitious and evidencebased climate commitments.
The experiences of Chile and Kyrgyzstan underscore a clear message: ambition is built on transparency. When governments are equipped with robust data, f it-for-purpose tools and strong support in building the capacity of institutions, they are better able to set credible targets, integrate mitigation and adaptation, and translate political will into actionable, monitorable commitments. ICAT’s support demonstrates that transparency is not a reporting exercise, but a strategic enabler of ambition—one that strengthens trust, guides investment and empowers countries to raise their climate goals in line with the urgency of the 1.5°C goal.
As the world looks to NDCs 3.0 to signal a decisive shift, ICAT’s work shows how targeted, country-driven support can help turn that signal into sustained and transformative climate action.
Story originally published in the 2025 ICAT Impact report
Out Now: The 2025 ICAT Impact Report
Andrés Pica Téllez: Chile’s NDC 3.0 Advances Integrated Mitigation and Adaptation Action
2025 ICAT Partner Forum: strengthening NDC 3.0 through transparency
