The Global NDC Conference Report 2025: Moving from Ambition to Implementation is a Conference Report from the Global NDC Conference 2025, held in Berlin from 11 to 13 June 2025. It summarizes the key discussions and outcomes of the conference, which brought together 359 participants from 63 countries to discuss how countries can translate updated Nationally Determined Contributions into practical implementation, investment, and scaling plans.
Key insights:
The conference focused on moving from climate ambition to implementation, with emphasis on making NDCs more actionable, financeable, inclusive, and aligned with national development priorities.
The three main themes were: raising ambition and turning pledges into progress, driving finance into NDC implementation, and identifying practical solutions that can be scaled and replicated.
A major message was that a good NDC should follow the “triple-A” principle: ambitious, actionable, and anchored in national development priorities.
The report stresses that NDCs must move beyond policy documents and become strategic tools that connect climate targets with implementation pathways, investment plans, governance systems, and inclusive development.
Climate justice, just transition, gender equity, youth participation, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and meaningful stakeholder engagement were presented as essential to building legitimate and effective NDCs.
Finance was a central focus. The report highlights the need for clear investment strategies, bankable project pipelines, de-risking tools, blended finance, stronger public-private collaboration, and better alignment between climate finance, development plans, and national budgets.
The conference also emphasized adaptation finance, sectoral decarbonization, alignment between NDCs and long-term strategies, stronger transparency systems through Biennial Transparency Reports, and the use of technology, AI, data, Article 6, nature-based solutions, and urban action to accelerate implementation.
Main message: Effective NDC implementation requires countries to turn ambition into practical, inclusive, and financeable action through strong governance, broad participation, credible data, investment-ready pipelines, and scalable solutions across sectors and levels of government.
