Mitigation Work Programme

The Mitigation Work Programme (MWP) is a process under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) designed to push countries to close the gap between current emissions trajectories and the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement. It was called for in the Glasgow Climate Pact at COP26 (2021) and formally established at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh (2022), where Parties agreed on its scope, modalities, and operational details.

The programme's purpose is to "urgently scale up mitigation ambition and implementation" during the 2020s, recognising that current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) collectively put the world on a path well above 1.5°C. Unlike the negotiation tracks that produce binding decisions, the MWP is intended to be facilitative rather than prescriptive: it does not impose new targets on individual countries and its outputs are not meant to result in new obligations.

Key features include:

• Global dialogues held at least twice per year, bringing together Parties, experts, businesses, and civil society to discuss specific mitigation themes (for example, energy transitions in the power and transport sectors).
• Investment-focused events held in conjunction with the dialogues.
• An annual report to the Conference of the Parties summarising opportunities, barriers, best practices, and solutions.
• A planned duration running through 2026, with a review of its continuation.

The MWP has been politically contested. Many developed countries and climate-vulnerable states (including AOSIS) pushed for it to drive concrete sectoral action and tighter NDCs, while several large developing economies emphasised that it must respect national circumstances and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR-RC), and must not become a vehicle for renegotiating the Paris Agreement's bottom-up architecture. Outcomes from the dialogues feed into the broader Global Stocktake process, the first cycle of which concluded at COP28 in Dubai in December 2023.