Global warming will exceed the 1.5°C goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement and countries’ climate plans, if fully delivered, would only limit it to 2.6°C by 2100, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Wednesday.
That projection is worse than the agency’s assessment a year ago, which UNEP attributed to the formal withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement and revised estimates of historical emissions. New national climate plans submitted since then have had almost no effect on expected emissions or warming, according to its annual Emissions Gap Report.
The report, the 17th in the series, concludes that the chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot, defined as a temporary exceedance of less than 0.1°C, has been lost. It instead measures countries against the lowest overshoot scenario still available, in which warming peaks at 1.7–1.8°C around mid-century and returns to 1.5°C or below by 2100, with about a 50 per cent chance.
To get on that path, global greenhouse gas emissions would need to fall 18 per cent by 2030, 45 per cent by 2035 and 69 per cent by 2040, all from 2025 levels.
As of 1 September, 124 parties to the Paris Agreement, covering about 76 per cent of global emissions, had submitted new nationally determined contributions (NDCs), the climate plans countries submit under the agreement, up from 57 covering 63 per cent a year earlier. Fully implemented, all current NDCs would cut emissions by 5–8 per cent by 2030 and 11–15 per cent by 2035.
That leaves a gap of 16 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) in 2035, even if countries also meet the targets that depend on international finance and technology support. Under current policies, the gap widens to 22 GtCO2e.
Closing it would require emissions to fall by an average of 5.7 per cent a year between 2025 and 2035. The previous benchmark, which assumed cuts starting in 2019, required 5 per cent a year.
Current net zero pledges leave warming above 2°C
Current policies put the world on course for 2.8°C of warming by 2100, with temperatures continuing to rise afterwards. It is the only projection in the report unchanged from last year.
Even if every NDC and long-term net zero target were met, warming would reach 2.1°C this century. That is the only scenario assessed with a better-than-even chance of keeping warming below 2°C.
Delay narrows the options further. Every five years of emissions at current levels adds around 200 GtCO2 to the atmosphere and pushes peak warming up by around 0.1°C, the report found. Without stringent cuts from 2025, even the lowest overshoot pathways now available will slip away. A University of Melbourne-led study reported by Eco-Business last week found that reaching net zero later would lock in more frequent extreme El Niño events for centuries.
The overshoot scenario also relies on removing and permanently storing roughly 320 GtCO2 from the atmosphere over the century. The report says the world’s ability to remove that much is uncertain, because of socioeconomic and technological barriers to scaling up removal methods.
“Overshoot is not surrender. We can still keep it as small and as short as possible – and bring temperatures back below 1.5 degrees by the end of the century,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a message on the report.
“This report shows that the world can still attain the goals of the Paris Agreement, but we must understand that the point of return begins now – with the implementation of fast, deep and sustained emissions reductions,” UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen wrote in the report’s foreword.
Global Emissions yet to peak
Global emissions were an estimated 58.4 GtCO2e in 2025, a slight fall of 0.1 GtCO2e from 2024. UNEP said the uncertainty range is too wide to conclude whether emissions are plateauing or peaking. It also revised its 2024 estimate upwards, from 57.7 GtCO2e to 58.5 GtCO2e, mainly because of a change in how land-use emissions are calculated.
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels continued to rise in 2025, as did nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases, while methane was almost unchanged. A fall of about 0.5 GtCO2e in emissions from land use and forestry, partly due to fewer wildfires, offset those increases.
The United States recorded the largest increase of any country, at 133 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, driven by rising electricity demand and a rebound in coal power. G20 members, excluding the African Union, account for 76 per cent of global emissions and increased their emissions by 0.7 per cent.
A 173-megawatt peak (MWp) solar power plant in Calatrava, Negros Occidental in the Philippines. Image: Aboitiz Renewables, Inc.
Renewables outpace forecasts, but fossil fuel continues growth
Renewables generated more electricity than coal for the first time in 2025, at 33.8 per cent of the global total against 33 per cent, the report found. Global renewable capacity has grown three times faster than anticipated in 2015, and solar seven times faster. Southeast Asia has lagged that pace; an Eco-Business analysis last year found that Singapore was the only country in the region growing renewable capacity fast enough to meet the global goal of tripling it by 2030.
Fossil fuel use has nonetheless kept growing, and total energy supply from coal, oil and gas is at its highest level ever. Over the past decade, the increase in coal was 45 per cent smaller than projected in 2015 and the increase in oil 20 per cent smaller, while gas grew broadly as expected. Subsidies for fossil fuels rose from about US$660 billion in 2018 to US$920 billion in 2024.
The report noted that the 2026 conflict in the Middle East has hit Southeast Asia particularly hard, as the region relies heavily on fossil fuel imports from there. UNEP listed Thailand’s move to let coal plants run at higher rates among measures that could delay the energy transition, and incentives in Malaysia and Singapore for raising space-cooling limits among those that could support it.
To stay on the overshoot path, coal-fired generation would need to fall at least 75 per cent from 2025 levels by 2035 and at least 95 per cent by 2040. Methane emissions would need to fall at least 25 per cent by 2035, and renewable capacity would need to at least triple from 2025 levels by then.
More than 220 policy evaluations reviewed in the report showed that climate policies cut emissions. Electricity sector policies delivered average reductions of 9 per cent, and carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes 5–13 per cent, relative to a no-policy baseline. Most studies, however, cover Europe, North America and China, with developing and emerging economies significantly underrepresented.
The report is released ahead of the COP31 climate summit in November. It says the second global stocktake, the Paris Agreement’s review of collective progress, could extend the quantified goals agreed in the first to 2035 and 2040.
