Breaching the 1.5C warming limit is now "imminent and unavoidable" after "decades of insufficient climate action", the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said in its annual emissions gap report.
The report, titled "The point of return" and published on October 21, says the task now is to keep any overshoot as small and as short as possible and to "establish a credible return path to 1.5C by the end of the century".
The report says the no-overshoot pathways used in earlier climate assessments have become outdated, and introduces updated benchmarks for a pathway that allows a temporary overshoot, and it arrives in the middle of another disaster season, with a "super" El Niño lifting temperatures. Emissions are now about 80% above where they needed to be by 2030 to hold warming to 1.5C with little or no overshoot, so that option "has now been lost", the report says.
Emissions stall, but do not fall
Global greenhouse gas emissions totalled 58.4bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2025, about 160mn tonnes less than in 2024, although the figures are provisional and the margin of error is wide. Emissions grew by an average of 1.7% a year between 1990 and 2015, and by 0.8% a year since 2016.
Emissions from fossil fuels still rose by 0.4-1.1%. A fall in emissions from land use and forestry slightly more than offset the rise, helped by fewer wildfires in Africa, South America and parts of south-east Asia as El Niño conditions eased. The current El Niño is likely to push land-use emissions back up in 2026, UNEP says.
Among the six biggest emitters only the US recorded a notable increase, adding 133mn tonnes of CO2 equivalent as electricity demand grew and coal power rebounded on a colder winter and higher gas prices. Emissions in China, the EU, India, Russia and Indonesia were broadly flat. Data centres, whose electricity demand is projected to double by 2030, account for less than 1% of global emissions.
Pledges far short
Countries were due to file new climate pledges for 2035, their third nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, by February 2025, and 95% missed the deadline. By September 1, 2026, 124 had done so, covering 75% of global emissions.
Even if every pledge is delivered in full, emissions would fall by only 5-8% by 2030 and 11-15% by 2035 from 2025 levels. The gap between countries' current policies and their pledges for 2030 has narrowed, but mainly because the US formally left the Paris Agreement: "policy changes, not policy progress", in the report's words.
Of the 17 G20 members, counting the EU as one, 14 have submitted 2035 targets. All except Japan, the EU and the UK would have to speed up their emissions cuts from current policies to reach their own net-zero goals.
Where warming is heading
Current policies would lead to 2.8C of warming this century, with a 66% chance, and a 10% chance of more than 3.4C. Delivering the unconditional pledges brings that to 2.7C, all pledges to 2.6C, and all pledges plus every net-zero target to 2.1C. The central estimates are 0.2-0.3C higher than in last year's report, because of the US withdrawal and higher estimates of past emissions.
The report's new "lowest 1.5C overshoot" pathway keeps peak warming to 1.7-1.8C around mid-century and brings it back to 1.5C by 2100, with a 50% chance. That requires emissions to fall by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040 from 2025 levels, and global CO2 emissions to reach net zero around 2050, alongside a large scale-up of carbon removal. Getting on that track means cuts of 5.7% a year over the next decade, faster than the 5% a year that would have been needed had cuts begun in 2019.
These figures replace the IPCC's sixth-assessment benchmarks of a 43% cut by 2030 and 60% by 2035 from 2019 levels. Keeping warming below 2C would need cuts of 11% by 2030, 24% by 2035 and 37% by 2040.
"For every five years of delay in starting to cut emissions, around another 0.1C of warming will be locked in," the report says. "Continued insufficient emission reductions over the next decades could make warming of 2C inevitable, putting the Paris Agreement at risk of failure."
Renewables the exception
Progress on the actions agreed at the COP28 summit in Dubai in 2023 is "uneven and insufficient", with one clear exception. Renewable capacity grew three times faster than 2015 projections assumed, so energy-related CO2 emissions rose 40% less than expected. "Only renewables are on track for 2030," the report says. COP31 host Turkey is part of that shift, with solar and wind now producing about a quarter of its electricity.
The world is furthest behind on moving away from fossil fuels and on stopping deforestation. Fossil energy use is still rising, if more slowly than forecast in 2015, and under current policies coal could peak by 2030 while oil and gas keep growing. Ending deforestation by 2030 would require slowing forest loss more than 10 times faster than now.
The lowest-overshoot path asks for a 15% cut in coal energy by 2030 from 2025, then 55% by 2035, 75% by 2040 and 90% by 2050. It is gentler on oil and gas this decade, at 5% and nothing respectively by 2030, but cuts their use by 65% and 75% by 2050, a timetable that would squeeze producers from the Gulf to Russia and the Caspian, where Azerbaijan has just adopted a net zero by 2060 strategy.
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