By 2020 at the latest, the parties to the Paris Agreement should confirm or update their nationally determined climate contribution (NDC) to the UN Climate Secretariat. Even before the special report "1.5 degrees global warming" of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published in October 2018, it has been known that there is a large gap between the currently communicated NDCs and the emission reduction efforts necessary to meet the temperature targets agreed in the Paris Agreement. The IPCC Special Report has also made it clear that the risks to nature and mankind of warming by 2 degrees compared to 1.5 degrees are much greater than previously assumed. In the next decade, the climate change mitigation ambition within and outside the EU must be substantially increased and accelerated.

The position paper outlines UBA recommendations on how the climate ambition in Europe should be increased by 2030, how the EU should promote ambitious climate protection at the global level, and what role the cooperative approaches from Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, in which states cooperate on a voluntary basis, could play.