A myriad of diplomats and politicians, businesses and NGOs will in early December be gathered in Paris to hammer out a new global climate agreement. The climate talks have progressed at snail’s pace over the recent years, and a few months ahead of the Paris summit the negotiation text has ballooned into more and more complex documents.

However, unlike the run-up to the climate summit in Copenhagen, the most spectacular failure of international climate diplomacy so far, the underlying trust and legitimacy in the process is far better this time around. It thus seems very likely that an agreement will be signed in Paris, and peering through the political fog it is actually possible to see the contours of the climate deal in the making.

Here is our best guess for the Paris agreement.

Burning the climate budget by 2040

The sum of national reduction targets, or the so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), will essentially determine the environmental ambition level of the new agreement. Countries have committed to submit their INDCs "well in advance of" COP21 in Paris, and around 60 countries, representing around 60 percent of global emissions, have so far submitted their post-2020 targets.

Looking at some of the largest emitters, China’s INDC indicates that the country could continue to increase its emissions towards 2030. Russia has also submitted an INDC that allows for an increase in emissions over the next 15 years. India has not yet submitted its INDC, but we do not expect the country to indicate a definite year for when it wants to peak the national emissions in the INDC.

Substantial decreases in the EU and the US will not be sufficient to offset increases in the emerging economies, and our assessment is that with the current pledges the world’s carbon budget, i.e. the cumulative global emissions consistent with a 2°C target, is likely to run out around 2040. Our estimate is in line with other assessments indicating the reduction targets currently on the table will set the world on a path towards a global warming of at least three degrees.

So if everyone agrees that the national pledges not will be sufficient to keep global warming at safe levels, why won’t there be actual negotiations to increase the environmental ambition already in Paris?

This is simply because the INDCs are the result of hard-won national compromises, balancing social, economic and environmental interests. In some cases, with the EU as the most obvious example, the reduction target is adopted through a complex internal negotiation process. Changing EU’s current reduction target of reducing emissions by 40 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 requires unanimous agreement among 28 member states. Such an agreement will obviously not be possible to achieve during the two-week negotiation session in Paris. This illustrates how the current INDCs are in terms of how countries will limit their emissions in the period up to 2025 or 2030 – not the starting point for the negotiations taking place in Paris.