The government of Norway announced a new climate target, aiming to reduce absolute economy-wide emissions by at least 70% to 75%, on a 2019 basis, by 2035.
The new decarbonization goal will form Norway’s new Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement. NDCs are national climate action plans presented by each country under the agreement, and are required to be updated every five years with increasingly higher ambition. Norway’s current NDC is to achieve a 55% reduction in emissions by 2030.
Under Norway’s new NDC submission, the government specifies that the target can be supported by Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs), if it is deemed necessary, opening the door for the use of a form of internationally traded carbon credits if required to reach the 2035 goal.
The potential for countries to use ITMOs to reach their climate goals was facilitated by an agreement reached at the COP 29 UN climate conference in November 2024 on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, aimed at establishing high integrity carbon markets, including on Article 6.2, detailing how countries will authorize carbon credit trading and how registries tracking this trading will operate to enable country-to-country carbon market trading. In June, Norway and Switzerland announced the first-ever international deal to be conducted under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement.
The new NDC submission doesn’t include detailed plans on Norway’s pathway to achieve its new 2035 goal, stating that “the Government plans to achieve the 2035 target through domestic measures and in cooperation with the European Union,” with more information to be provided with Norway’s future biennial transparency reports (BTR). The NDC does detail Norway’s key policy instruments to pursue its climate goals, however, which include “taxation of greenhouse gas emissions, regulatory measures including the emissions trading scheme, climate-related requirements in public procurement processes, information on climate-friendly options, financial support for the development of new technologies, such as CCS, and initiatives to promote research and innovation.”
Norway’s Minister of Climate and Environment, Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, said:
“Before the Paris Agreement, the world was heading towards an expected temperature increase of nearly 4 degrees. Recent analyses show that fulfilling the current NDCs puts us on a path towards 2.6 degrees. This shows that the Paris Agreement is working. As countries now are strengthening their NDCs, we can get closer to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.”
