Increasing the ambition of the EU Nationally Determined Contribution: lessons from a survey of experts and students

The Paris Agreement targets and an increasingly large public opinion movement world-wide require to progressively raise the ambition of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). The European Union (EU) could play a crucial role in this process being one of the first Parties to submit its NDC and to call for the integration of the ratchet-up mechanism for ambition in the Paris Agreement. An enhanced EU NDC, therefore, would convey a powerful signal to the other UNFCCC Parties, reinforce the credibility of EU climate policy, and confirm the EU as a global “climate leader”. This paper examines whether and how the EU could enhance its NDC. For this purpose, it proposes some of the most likely and accredited options that could be pursued to achieve this goal. To dig deeper into this issue, the paper presents the results of a survey conducted among experts (scholars, practitioners, negotiators) and non-experts (students), using a mixed methods research design that combines qualitative and quantitative analyses to provide an ex-ante assessment of the selected policy options. The survey’s results show that increasing the EU NDC ambition is perceived as hard but feasible by both groups of interviewees. However, the non-experts’ group considers more options to be feasible showing in general a more optimistic attitude towards enhancing the EU NDC.