Saudi Arabia

Critically Insufficient4°C+ World

NDCs with this rating fall well outside of a country’s “fair share” range and are not at all consistent with holding warming to below 2°C let alone with the Paris Agreement’s stronger 1.5°C limit. If all government NDCs were in this range, warming would exceed 4°C.

Highly insufficient< 4°C World

NDCs with this rating fall outside of a country’s “fair share” range and are not at all consistent with holding warming to below 2°C let alone with the Paris Agreement’s stronger 1.5°C limit. If all government NDCs were in this range, warming would reach between 3°C and 4°C.

Insufficient< 3°C World

NDCs with this rating are in the least stringent part of a country’s “fair share” range and not consistent with holding warming below 2°C let alone with the Paris Agreement’s stronger 1.5°C limit. If all government NDCs were in this range, warming would reach over 2°C and up to 3°C.

2°C Compatible< 2°C World

NDCs with this rating are consistent with the 2009 Copenhagen 2°C goal and therefore fall within a country’s “fair share” range, but are not fully consistent with the Paris Agreement long term temperature goal. If all government NDCs were in this range, warming could be held below, but not well below, 2°C and still be too high to be consistent with the Paris Agreement 1.5°C limit.

1.5°C Paris Agreement Compatible< 1.5°C World

This rating indicates that a government’s NDCs in the most stringent part of its “fair share” range: it is consistent with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit.

Role model<< 1.5°C World

This rating indicates that a government’s NDC is more ambitious than what is considered a “fair” contribution: it is more than consistent with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit.

Global warming potentials

Previous assessments of the Climate Action Tracker used the global warming potentials (GWPs) from the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (SAR). For this assessment we have updated all figures and time series to GWPs from the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Historical emissions

Historical emissions up to 2012 were obtained gas by gas from UNFCCC (2018) and converted into AR4 GWPs. For 2013–2015, a combination of different data sources was used to complete the emissions trajectory excluding LULUCF: IEA (2017) for energy-related CO2 emissions, IEA (2017) for other CO2 emissions and US EPA (2012) for non-CO2 emissions, with interpolation for the years in between for the data from US EPA and a trend extrapolation for other CO2 emissions for 2015. LULUCF values for 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2012 were taken from UNFCCC (2018).

Current policy projections

Our current policy projection range reflects optimistic and pessimistic assumptions on the implementation of the 9.5 GW target for renewable energy from Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030”. Both pathways are based on growth rates from KAUST (2014) for energy-related emissions, US EPA (2012) projections for non-CO2 emissions and extrapolation of the historical trend for other CO2 emissions.

Since the KAUST projections assume the plan of installing 54 GW of renewables and 17 GW of nuclear was going to be executed by 2032, we additionally quantified the downscaling of the renewable and nuclear power targets. For the lower end of the range we assume renewable power will continue to grow at a similar rate post-2023 and the 17 GW nuclear power target is achieved in 2040. For the upper end of the range we assume renewable power remains at 9.5 GW post-2023, with no nuclear capacity additions to 9.5 GW and assumed no nuclear capacity additions for the upper end. For both pathways, we used the emission factor of fossil power generation from IEA (2014) and (weighted) full load hours for renewable and nuclear power from the KAUST projections.

The effect of deregulation in energy prices by a subsidy phase-out is reflected in both pathways and calculated based on the expected impact on the consumption of diesel oil and gasoline. An IISD report estimated that the effect of subsidy phase-out would result in a reduction in emissions by 30.4% below BAU in 2025 and 27.8% in 2030 if subsidies had been phased out by 2020 (Merrill, Bassi, Bridle, & Christensen, 2015). Based on this study, we estimate that the delayed phase-out will lead to a reduction of fuel consumption, resulting in emissions reductions of 53 MtCO2e in 2030. The effect of the introduced 5% VAT for fuels is not quantified in our assessment since there is no data available on the effect of this policy.

The planned policy projections are based on the lower range of the current policy pathway but also take into account the full implementation of the recently announced 200 GW solar plant

Pledges and targets

Since Saudi Arabia has not yet communicated the BAU for its NDC target, we quantified the target based on our estimates of the BAU. The lower end of the BAU range represents extrapolation of Saudi Arabia’s 2005–2010 emissions trend. The upper end of the range represents a baseline projection starting in 2010 and assuming no further expansion of renewable and nuclear power generation. We based this scenario on adjusted projections from KAUST (2014) for energy-related emissions, complemented by US EPA (2012) projections for non-CO2 emissions and extrapolation of the historic trend for other CO2 emissions from IEA (2017).