The world is now expected to blow past the 1.5°C warming limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement, and the United Nations’ annual climate scorecard has shifted from asking how to avoid that line to asking how to get back under it. The UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2026, titled “The point of return” and released Oct. 21, says global greenhouse gas emissions would have to fall 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040, compared with 2025 levels, to bring warming back to 1.5°C by the end of the century.
Even that path assumes a temporary overshoot. In UNEP’s “lowest possible” scenario, warming peaks at about 1.7 to 1.8°C around mid-century before falling back to 1.5°C or below by 2100, with roughly a 50% chance of success, according to UNEP’s announcement. Getting there would also require removing and permanently storing about 320 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide over the century.
Countries’ Pledges Fall Far Short
The gap between what is needed and what governments have promised remains wide. If every country fully delivered its current climate plan, known as a nationally determined contribution, emissions would fall only 5% to 8% by 2030 and 11% to 15% by 2035. That would still leave the world on track for about 2.6°C of warming this century, and current policies point to roughly 2.8°C.
Global emissions reached about 58.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025, a provisional figure that was slightly lower than the year before, Carbon Brief reported. Among the six largest emitters, only the United States posted a notable increase, and UNEP said the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was a major reason its warming projections got worse than last year’s.
Every Fraction of a Degree Counts
“Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5°C increases climate impacts and risks,” UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said, urging nations to “pull out all the stops to minimize peak warming.” The report estimates that every five years of carbon dioxide emissions at current levels adds about 0.1°C to peak warming.
Those fractions show up in daily life as heavier storms, deadlier heat and strained infrastructure, the kind of damage SSC saw when flooding shut down Istanbul this month. A longer and higher overshoot means more years of that risk before temperatures can come back down.
The Report Still Sees a Path
UNEP argues there are more tools than ever to close the gap. Since the Paris Agreement was adopted, global renewable electricity capacity has grown about three times faster than expected and solar about seven times faster, while energy from coal and oil has grown more slowly than projected. The report sets new benchmarks for expanding renewables, cutting energy waste, shrinking the share of fossil fuels and reducing methane after 2030.
Scaling up policies that already work could put the world on the lowest-overshoot path, the report says, and Andersen pointed to “a wealth of success stories showing that emissions can be cut quickly.” Whether governments use them will become clearer as countries bring new climate plans to the next round of UN talks, with 124 nations having submitted updated pledges by September that cover about three-quarters of global emissions.