Tajikistan presents draft of third-cycle climate NDC

According to the Committee for Environmental Protection under the Government of the Republic of Tajikistan, the draft third-cycle nationally determined contribution — NDC 3.0 — was presented and discussed in Dushanbe on 31 August. Representatives of government agencies, the private sector, international organisations, youth and civil society took part in the discussion; the agenda covered climate targets, sectoral priorities and further implementation steps. The committee's own statement gives no numerical parameters. Asia-Plus named the target of the draft on 3 September, quoting the document itself: a 15% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 “compared to the base year.” The outlet does not specify which year is meant, but the year itself is not in doubt: Tajikistan's base year remains 1990, and the biennial transparency report separately calls it fixed, citing decision 4/CMA.1 on the consistent use of a once-chosen reference point. The question is not which year this is, but which 1990 figure is meant. No other publications citing the 15% figure were found in the available open sources — a report on the draft's presentation that came out a day earlier does not name any figures at all.

And the base year 1990 now has two figures. The former inventory estimate is 36.9 mn tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, the recalculated figure is 24.4 mn tonnes, and both refer to the same year. If the 15% is counted from the recalculated figure, which the report declares to be the base, the 2035 ceiling is 20.7 mn tonnes — against actual emissions of 20.2 mn tonnes in 2022. If counted from the former estimate, to which the absolute figures of the current target are pegged, the ceiling rises to 31.4 mn tonnes. The gap between the two readings of the same target is more than ten million tonnes — more than half of what the country emits in a year.

Nominally, the new target is lower than the current one: 15% versus the 30–40% unconditional and 40–50% conditional-on-international-support cuts that the 2021 NDC, submitted in October, counts from the 1990 level to 2030. But whether it is stricter or looser in substance depends on which 1990 figure is used: 15% off the recalculated base gives 20.7 mn tonnes, which falls inside the 2021 NDC's conditional range of 17.76–21.32 mn tonnes; 15% off the former estimate gives 31.4 mn tonnes, above either of its ranges. The 2035 horizon here is not a deadline shift but the standard framework of the third cycle; whether the draft retains a separate 2030 target is not clear from the reports.

Tajikistan launched the NDC update in the summer of 2025 with a national workshop in Dushanbe — a scheduled five-year cycle, not a one-off initiative. The process is led by the Committee for Environmental Protection, with the Regional Environmental Centre for Central Asia involved through the SWITCH-Asia component. According to Asia-Plus, the committee and the Youth Ecological Centre announced the presentation of the draft, while the drafting itself is carried out with technical support from UNDP in partnership with the Agency for Hydrometeorology; a network of climate NGOs contributed proposals on inclusiveness and a just transition. The outlet writes that the document separately addresses the social side of climate policy — gender equality, protection of vulnerable groups, “green” jobs.

The inventory underlying all these calculations is fixed in Tajikistan's First Biennial Transparency Report submitted to the UNFCCC. In 2022, emissions totalled 20.2 mn tonnes of CO₂ equivalent excluding land use — 17.7% below the 1990 level; including land use, 19.5 mn tonnes, or 25.8% below. The base year itself was recalculated for the report using the 2006 IPCC Guidelines and the global warming potentials from the Fifth Assessment Report: 1990 emissions excluding land use fell from the former 36.9 to 24.39 mn tonnes, with most of the revision coming from agriculture, down 7.6 mn tonnes, and energy, down 5.7 mn tonnes. The emissions structure changed no less than the totals: in 2022, energy accounted for 40.8%, agriculture 34.8%, industrial processes 13.6% and waste 10.9%, against shares of 64.0%, 19.0%, 12.3% and 4.7% in 1990. The report separately notes that the economic downturn of the 1990s cut emissions threefold, and that they have been rising again since 1999.

The rebasing has a consequence the current NDC does not resolve, and a second one has now been added to it. The 2021 targets are set both in percentages and in absolute figures: 21.32–24.87 mn tonnes for the unconditional target, 17.76–21.32 for the conditional one. These absolute figures were derived as 60–70% of the 1990 base of 35.53 mn tonnes, and the NDC itself defines that base as net emissions — the list of covered sectors includes a separate line for forestry at minus 1.82 mn tonnes, meaning the base was calculated including land use. The 2024 biennial transparency report redefined the target's scope: in it, “greenhouse gas emissions” mean total emissions “excluding LULUCF,” the coverage is described the same way, and the base figure is declared as 24,386 kt excluding land use. The former absolute ceilings are repeated unchanged.

Hence a discrepancy visible in simple arithmetic. From the figure the report declares as the base, the same 60–70% gives 14.6–17.1 mn tonnes, not 21.32–24.87. In other words, “minus 30% by 2030” means 25.8 mn tonnes if counted from the former 1990 estimate to which the target was pegged when the NDC was submitted, and 17.1 mn tonnes if counted from the current base. The stated “minus 15% by 2035,” counted from the current base, gives 20.7 mn tonnes. Both figures are worth holding up against the fact that in 2022 the country emitted 20.2 mn tonnes — 82.3% of the 1990 level against a 60–70% target. Reconciling the former absolute ceilings, the recalculated base and the new percentage target into one count is now a task for the third NDC.

A separate line of the update concerns Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. In the biennial transparency report, Tajikistan states that it is considering participation in cooperative approaches using internationally transferred mitigation outcomes under Articles 4 and 6. For a country where hydropower plants account for 90.1% of electricity generation and the target ranges for per-capita emissions are 1.5–2.2 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, this mechanism hinges above all on access to climate finance.

The indicative submission deadline has already passed. Third-cycle NDCs with updated 2030 figures and new 2035 targets were expected from countries by early 2025; those submitted are to feed into the annual update of the UNFCCC secretariat's synthesis report ahead of COP31, to be held in Antalya from 9 to 20 November 2026.