Ambitious climate targets alone are not enough – policies must also be implemented to achieve these targets. A variety of tools and assessments already exist to assess goal setting, but few exist to assess implementation.

The Climate Transparency Partnership brings together climate assessments and expertise from organizations across the G20 countries. The partnership has been analyzing the G20's progress in transforming to a green economy since 2014 using independent, comparable, and comprehensive data. The partnership includes 16 civil society organizations from 14 G20 countries.

The Policy Implementation Check provides a clear framework to verify at an early stage that policies are being implemented toward achieving a country's NDC. This early check is important because policy outcomes and impacts on GHG emissions are usually not measurable until several years after implementation. In most cases, therefore, there is little time to make course corrections if implementation of measures is weak. The Implementation Check is therefore an important tool for stakeholders to assess the implementation status of measures and, if necessary, to push governments to be more active.

The Implementation Check methodology can be used to review the implementation of any policy measure. It examines various characteristics of policy implementation, which can be grouped into four categories: Legal Status, Institutions & Governance, Resourcing, and Oversight. For each of these categories, the framework includes specific questions designed to make the results comparable across countries.