Nepal

In its NDC, submitted in 2016, Nepal published plans to build resilience to climate change impacts as well as to reduce GHG emissions. Nepal has given central importance to climate change adaptation in its development plans and policies. To implement these, it plans to rely mostly on technical and financial support from development partners. Although Nepal has shown its intent to reduce GHG emissions, it has not outlined a clear overall GHG reduction target or commitment in its NDC. Under its Low Carbon Economic Development Strategy, it aims to catalyse concrete actions that would support low carbon economic development. This strategy would focus on mitigating emissions in the energy, agriculture, industry, transport, waste, residential and commercial sectors (Government of Nepal, 2016b). Some of the main elements with regards to emission mitigation in its NDC are:

• To achieve an 80% share of electricity from renewable sources in the energy mix by 2050
• To reduce dependency on fossil fuels by 50%
• To expand its energy mix focusing on renewables by 20% by 2020
• To increase the share of electric vehicles to 20% by 2020
• To decrease its dependency on fossils in transport sector to 50% by 2050
• To maintain 40% of the total area of the country under forest cover
• To reduce about 14 million tonnes of CO2e by 2020 with a sub-national project on REDD+
• To deploy renewable systems under the National Rural Renewable Energy Program (NRREP)
• To build an electrical (hydro-powered) rail network by 2040

The measures reflect Nepal’s objective to steer itself on a low carbon development pathway, but there are many individual actions with different target years, and some actions lack detail and leave room for further specification.

In the NDC, the National Rural and Renewable Energy Program (NRREP) is mentioned. However, many of the details under NRREP are missing, such as the target year, the characteristics of the energy systems to be installed, and whether the target is additional or cumulative.

In addition to the NDC, Nepal prepared a national (preliminary) report on the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The report assesses the national situation by each SDG and provides inputs for national planning, dialogue, and shows a pathway for implementation. Regarding SDG13 on climate change, the proposed target for Nepal purports to “halve existing CO2 emissions level” (Government of Nepal, 2015). Many details, such as the base year, whether the target covers the entire economy and whether it is an absolute or intensity target are missing, which is the reason for not quantitatively assessing it here.