WHAT IS NDC?
NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) are voluntary climate commitments established by each country that ratified the Paris Agreement (2015), with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and mitigating climate change. NDCs are reviewed periodically, allowing countries to increase their targets as socioeconomic and technological conditions evolve.
Each NDC is tailored to the particularities of the country, reflecting its responsibilities and capabilities, and covers both emission reduction targets and climate change adaptation actions.
In the case of Brazil, the first NDC was presented in 2015, based on 2005, the period in which the country recorded its highest GHG emissions, mainly due to deforestation. This historical baseline was important for setting ambitious reduction targets, but it also faced significant challenges in its implementation, with several updates being made over the years.
During COP29, Brazil announced its new Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) target, defining that the country should keep its CO2e emissions between 0.85 and 1.05 until 2035. The new target represents a decrease of 59% to 67% in emissions compared to its baseline year of 2005 and between 13% and 29% compared to the national target for 2030, and represents an increase in ambition compared to the previous NDC. Fulfilling its promise to submit its NDC early, Brazil becomes the second country in the world to announce its target for 2035 and innovates by presenting its result in a band, allowing flexibility in the target, but keeping it unconditional.
The published NDC is comprehensive across all sectors of the economy and its main implementation instrument is the Climate Plan. In turn, the Climate Plan is divided into two main pillars: the Mitigation Plan and the Adaptation Plan, each subdivided into several sectoral plans that list actions and levers to promote decarbonization and adaptation in sectors of the Brazilian economy.
Why does it matter to the company?
NDCs are extremely relevant to the business sector, as they outline a country's climate ambitions and guide public policies and decarbonization goals that directly affect the operations of industries and companies. They provide predictability regarding future rules for reducing emissions, which is essential for strategic planning and resource allocation by corporations. Through NDCs, the government encourages energy transition models and carbon markets, encouraging companies to invest in low-carbon technologies and innovations that promote sustainability.
NDCs are extremely relevant to the business sector, as they outline a country's climate ambitions and guide public policies and decarbonization goals that directly affect the operations of industries and companies. They provide predictability regarding future rules for reducing emissions, which is essential for strategic planning and resource allocation by corporations. Through NDCs, the government encourages energy transition models and carbon markets, encouraging companies to invest in low-carbon technologies and innovations that promote sustainability.
The seven sectoral mitigation plans that make up the Climate Plan involve the main sectors of the Brazilian economy: agriculture and livestock; land use and forests; cities and urban mobility; energy; industry and mining; waste and transport.
Each sector will need to prepare emissions inventories, project scenarios, list relevant public policies, and make decarbonization commitments by 2035, as well as structure governance, financing, and monitoring mechanisms. This is similar to the absolute targets contained in Brazil's NDC.
Translating goals into concrete actions is a fundamental step for Brazil to fulfill its NDC, providing predictability for the private sector to invest and prioritize innovation based on the climate agenda. Further detailing and in-depth discussion of financing channels are still necessary, as this remains a bottleneck that will also be a topic of debate in Belém. COP30 definitively seals the role of companies as accelerators of implementation, making tangible one of the main legacies of the first decade of the Paris Agreement.
WHAT DOES CEBDS SAY ABOUT IT?
The vision of the Brazilian business sector, echoed by international business coalitions such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the We Mean Business Coalition (WMBC), was materialized in the document “Call to Action from the Brazilian Business Sector Towards an Ambitious and Implementable NDC”, launched by CEBDS during Climate Week, defending an ambitious target, clear implementation policies that stimulate investments and the broad transparent participation of the business sector in its construction process, in which 55 Brazilian companies, including giants such as Natura, Nestlé, Siemens Energy and Itaú were signatories.
In March 2025, an important development in this mobilization was the delivery of the document "How Brazil's New NDC can boost private sector investment in climate action," also produced in partnership with the WMBC, to the COP30 Presidency.
CEBDS also contributed to the public consultations on the National Mitigation Strategy and the Sectoral Plans. In the last stage of public consultation on the sectoral plans, more than 180 contributions were submitted by companies associated with CEBDS. Additionally, we brought together more than 200 entities in four sectoral coalitions organized at the request of the COP30 Presidency: Transport, Electricity, Agriculture, and Essential Minerals, in a collaborative and pre-competitive effort that brings together companies, governments, and civil society to build convergences. The first of these, the Transport Coalition, effectively contributed to the federal government's Transport Sectoral Plan; now, the other coalitions are in the final stages of development and will provide a framework of actions for the effective decarbonization of these segments, aligned with the sectoral plans.
CEBDS understands the NDCs as an opportunity for the private sector to actively collaborate with the government in fulfilling climate commitments, emphasizing that climate goals must be investable. This means that companies should be incentivized to contribute solutions that generate financial returns, in addition to a positive impact in terms of sustainability. The president of CEBDS, Marina Grossi, highlighted that Brazil It has the role of leading global efforts to increase climate ambition, and policies such as the Green Transformation Plan and the Regulated Carbon Market are fundamental to this goal.