A framework for national scenarios with varying emission reductions

National-level climate actions will be vital in achieving global temperature goals in the coming decades. Near-term (2025–2030) plans are laid out in Nationally Determined Contributions; the next step is the submission of long-term strategies for 2050. At present, national scenarios underpinning long-term strategies are poorly coordinated and incompatible across countries, preventing assessment of individual nations’ climate policies. Here we present a systematic and standardized, yet flexible, scenario framework varying 2050 emissions to build long-term national energy and climate mitigation scenarios. Applying the framework to six major Asian countries reveals individual challenges in energy system transformation and investment needs in comparable scenarios. This framework could be a starting point for comprehensive assessments as input to the Global Stocktake over the coming years. There is no common structure for the way national emissions scenarios are created, hindering efforts for comparison and analysis at the larger scale. This Perspective presents a framework to guide individual national scenario creation in a standardized way.