The United Nations has delivered its starkest message yet on how far the world still is from honouring the Paris Agreement. In its sixteenth Emissions Gap Report, UNEP concludes that new national climate plans have only “barely moved the needle” on the planet’s long-term temperature path, even though the Paris deal has clearly nudged the world away from the most extreme scenarios.

According to the new Emissions Gap Report 2025: Off Target, if every country fully implements its latest nationally determined contributions (NDCs), global warming by 2100 is now projected to reach between 2.3°C and 2.5°C above pre-industrial levels. That is a modest improvement on last year’s estimate of 2.6–2.8°C. Based on today’s actual policies, however, the world is still headed for about 2.8°C of warming this century. UNEP stresses that these numbers are far above the Paris temperature goals of keeping warming “well below 2°C” and pursuing efforts to stay under 1.5°C.

The headline drop of 0.3°C in projected warming compared to last year’s report turns out to be far less encouraging than it looks. UNEP explains that around a third of this apparent progress comes from technical updates to the way the projections are calculated, not from real-world emission cuts. Another 0.1°C of the improvement will effectively be cancelled by the upcoming withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement in January 2026, as that move is expected to increase future emissions and weaken global ambition. Once those factors are stripped out, the new pledges themselves have shaved only a few hundredths of a degree off expected warming.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres did not sugar-coat the implications when he addressed the report’s findings. In a message released alongside the UNEP analysis, he warned that with current commitments, the world is “on course for a climate breakdown”, and that the climb to a liveable future “gets steeper by the day”. The accompanying UNEP press release states plainly that a multi-decadal overshoot of 1.5°C is now very likely within the next decade, even in scenarios where emissions are rapidly reduced after 2025.

The uncomfortable contrast between progress and peril is at the heart of this year’s message. Before the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, some scenarios suggested that unchecked emissions could push global temperatures towards 4–5°C by the end of the century. Early assessments of the first round of pledges still pointed to warming “below 3.5°C” at best, even with full implementation, as shown in the Emissions Gap Report 2015. Moving from those trajectories to today’s 2.3–2.5°C range is a real achievement.

But UNEP is equally clear that it is nowhere near enough. To align with a 2°C pathway, global emissions in 2035 must fall about 35 percent below 2019 levels. For a 1.5°C pathway, the required drop is an enormous 55 percent by 2035, according to the latest Emissions Gap Report. On current pledges, the world is heading for only around a 15 percent reduction by that date, and even that assumes that all promises are delivered in full.

The timeline is brutally tight. UNEP calculates that emissions in 2030 would need to be about 25 percent lower than in 2019 for a likely chance of keeping warming under 2°C, and 40 percent lower for a 1.5°C-compatible path. Yet global greenhouse gas emissions still rose by roughly 2.3 percent in 2024, reaching a record 57.7 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent, the organisation notes in its press release on the 2025 Emissions Gap Report. In other words, the world is not just moving too slowly toward the required cuts; it is still moving, overall, in the wrong direction.

UNEP’s analysis also underlines the cost of political backsliding. The report and related media coverage highlight that the planned withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, coupled with domestic rollbacks of climate policies, is expected to add about 0.1°C to the planet’s long-term warming, effectively nullifying a third of the recent reduction in projected temperatures. Reporting by outlets such as Inside Climate News, in its article “New UN Report Warns of Lagging Climate Action”, notes that U.S. officials even asked UNEP to strip U.S.-specific data from the report, a request the agency refused.

While political debates continue, the climate system is responding to physics, not promises. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that warming beyond 2°C would mean severe and often irreversible impacts, including drowning of low-lying island nations, large-scale coastal flooding, and intolerable heat stress for hundreds of millions of people. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment on impacts and vulnerabilities lays out the escalating risks to food systems, health and infrastructure as temperatures climb, particularly for small islands and communities in tropical and subtropical regions, in its Working Group II report.

These impacts are not abstract future threats. Europe already provides a stark case study of what a heating world looks like in economic terms. The European Environment Agency finds that weather- and climate-related extremes caused about €822 billion in losses across the EU between 1980 and 2024, with average annual losses jumping from under €20 billion in the 2010s to about €44.9 billion per year between 2020 and 2024. That trend is documented in an updated EEA indicator on economic losses from climate extremes. Crucially, most of these losses were not insured, leaving households and public budgets to absorb the shocks.

For climate diplomats and campaigners heading toward COP30 in Belém, Brazil, the new UNEP report is both a warning and a briefing document. Observers expect the summit to focus less on drafting a brand-new grand bargain and more on forcing real-world implementation of the commitments countries have already made. Analysts quoted in coverage by Inside Climate News and others stress that leaders will need to reaffirm the Paris goals and then go much further, by turbo-charging efforts to triple global renewable energy capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements this decade.

One of the most sobering aspects of the latest analysis is how small increments of warming translate into big jumps in risk. Every tenth of a degree matters. Research synthesized by UNEP shows that reversing a 0.1°C overshoot of 1.5°C would require permanently removing and storing around five years’ worth of today’s global CO₂ emissions, relying on carbon removal methods that remain uncertain at the required scale. That finding is highlighted in the UNEP press release on new climate pledges. The more the world leans on future carbon removal instead of cutting emissions now, the greater the risk that those technologies under-deliver, locking in higher temperatures and deeper damage.

Even the fossil fuel industry, which has reaped record profits since the energy shock triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is not insulated from these trends. Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres points to analysis from the International Energy Agency showing that production from existing oil and gas fields is declining by roughly 5–7 percent per year on average, meaning that nearly all new investment now goes into offsetting natural decline rather than expanding supply. The IEA’s recent report “The Implications of Oil and Gas Field Decline Rates” warns that this accelerating decline makes long-term bets on fossil fuels increasingly risky, especially as clean energy alternatives become cheaper and more widespread.

If there is a thread of hope running through the Emissions Gap Report, it lies in the rapid progress of those alternatives. UNEP notes that the technologies needed to slash emissions quickly—particularly solar and wind power and energy-efficiency measures—are already available and falling in cost. The question is not whether humanity knows what to do, but whether governments, companies and financial institutions will move at the speed that physics demands rather than the pace politics finds comfortable.

As Guterres put it, the world has not yet lost the chance to stabilise temperatures around 1.5°C by the end of the century, but only if ambition rises sharply, starting now. The new UN report makes the stakes brutally clear: delay locks in danger. Every policy that keeps fossil fuels in the ground, every new solar panel or wind turbine, and every fraction of a degree of avoided warming is the difference between a manageable future and one defined by escalating, irreversible climate chaos.