Nationally Determined Contributions under Paris Agreement From Theory to Practice

Paris Agreement was approved as a strategic document aimed at directing environmental policy in the world in 2015. It has been designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and in order to achieve such goal, adopting a bottom-up structure, it provided for the parties to determine the extent and scope of their obligations to mitigate these gases considering their capabilities. Under Paris Agreement, parties have a binding obligation of conduct to communicate NDC’s. Countries are facing with difficulties when preparing their NDC’s and other countries experiment will be significantly helpful for Iran in this area. This paper, in addition to studying two significant principles in states’ obligation in their NDCs, can pave the way for policy-makers to let them know to recognize the type of Iran’s obligations in its NDC and how such contributions are prepared. This study shows that Paris Agreement, although, did not develop any guidelines for preparing NDC’s, it established a new framework resulting in increased transparency and indicating individual and collective progress of states in mitigation.