The new assessment comes in the UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2025: Off Target. The report compares where global emissions are heading with current and promised policies to where they must be to keep warming “well below” 2°C and as close as possible to 1.5°C, as agreed in Paris in 2015. According to the report and its supporting press release, if all current national climate plans (NDCs) were fully implemented, projected warming over this century would now land between 2.3 and 2.5°C. Under today’s policies, which fall short of those plans, the world is still on track for roughly 2.8°C – only a modest improvement from last year’s 3.1°C estimate.

Digging into the numbers reveals how fragile that progress really is. UNEP notes that only about a third of countries had submitted updated climate plans with targets for 2035 by the end of September 2025, even though this year is the third major deadline for strengthening pledges under the Paris Agreement. A methodological tweak in how future warming is calculated accounts for about 0.1°C of the apparent improvement, and the upcoming US exit from the Paris Agreement will cancel out roughly another 0.1°C, according to UNEP’s executive director’s statement. That means the new pledges themselves have barely nudged the world off last year’s trajectory.

Country-level trends are pulling in opposite directions. Analysis by Carbon Brief of the Emissions Gap data concludes that China’s emissions are now expected to peak around 2025, with cuts by 2030 driven by a surge in renewable power outpacing electricity demand growth, as summarized in this overview. In stark contrast, US emissions projections for 2030 have risen by around a billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent compared with last year’s assessment, largely because of “policy reversals” under the new administration. Independent tracking by Climate Action Tracker describes how President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” dismantles large parts of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy support and paves the way to loosen power-plant and vehicle standards, sharply weakening US climate policy, as detailed for example in their US country profile.

Those rollbacks are already rippling through the global numbers. A recent analysis by the Rhodium Group, reported by the Financial Times, warns that the policy shift could more than halve the pace of US decarbonisation and even push emissions back up in the 2030s unless climate measures are restored, with knock-on effects for the world’s ability to meet the Paris goals, as summarized in this report. The Emissions Gap Report explicitly notes that the US withdrawal from Paris alone erases part of the slim progress seen this year, underscoring how decisions in a handful of major economies can move the global thermometer by tenths of a degree.

The UN findings land against a backdrop of record-breaking heat. The World Meteorological Organization’s latest State of the Global Climate confirms that 2024 was the warmest year in at least 175 years of records, with global average temperatures about 1.55°C above the 1850–1900 baseline. Over the decade from 2015 to 2024, the world has been roughly 1.25°C warmer on average than in pre-industrial times, according to WMO and other datasets compiled by NASA’s global temperature indicator. Scientists stress that a single year at 1.5°C does not, by itself, mean the Paris limit is legally or scientifically “broken”, which is defined over a longer period. But taken together, the new data show that the planet is now brushing dangerously close to that threshold.

UNEP’s 2025 report bluntly concludes that a “multi-decadal” overshoot of 1.5°C is now all but inevitable. The question is how far above 1.5°C the world goes, and for how long. To keep the overshoot relatively small – around 0.3°C – UNEP says global emissions would need to fall by about 26 percent by 2030 and 46 percent by 2035 compared with 2019 levels, according to its press statement. The underlying report estimates that aligning with the Paris temperature goals would require global emissions cuts of roughly 35 percent for a 2°C pathway and 55 percent for a 1.5°C pathway by 2035, as spelled out in the summary of key findings. In other words, we have to slash global pollution roughly in half in just over a decade, from an emissions level that is still rising.

What is at stake in those tenths of a degree is not abstract. The IPCC’s landmark Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C showed that every additional increment of warming sharply increases the risks of deadly heat, drought, floods and sea-level rise. One synthesis by the World Resources Institute found that under 1.5°C of warming, about 14 percent of the world’s population would be exposed to severe heat waves at least once every five years, but at 2°C that share jumps to around 37 percent – hundreds of millions more people regularly facing extreme, potentially lethal heat, as illustrated in this analysis. Other assessments estimate that an extra half-degree of warming could expose tens of millions more people worldwide to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages and coastal flooding, as explained by climate educators such as Climate Smart Hyde Park.

Coastal cities, food systems and ecosystems also see dramatically different futures at 1.5°C versus 2°C and beyond. The IPCC warns that coral reefs are likely to decline by 70–90 percent even at 1.5°C but almost completely disappear at 2°C, and that limiting warming to 1.5°C roughly halves the number of people exposed to increased water stress compared with a 2°C world, as summarized in the report’s summary for policymakers. The UN’s own “degrees matter” explainer notes that keeping as close as possible to 1.5°C reduces the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in ice sheets, forest die-back and ocean circulation, with enormous implications for long-term sea-level rise and global stability, as described on this overview page.

Despite these warnings, global emissions are still edging higher. A Reuters summary of the Emissions Gap findings reports that planet-warming pollution rose by about 2.3 percent in 2024, reaching roughly 57.7 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, according to UNEP’s analysis and preliminary data from the International Energy Agency, as covered in this article. That is the opposite of what science says is needed: UN climate reports have long warned that to keep 1.5°C “alive”, global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak immediately and fall by around 43 percent by 2030 compared with 2019, a point reiterated on the UN’s climate reports portal and in the 2024 Emissions Gap assessment.

The political stakes are rising too. The Emissions Gap Report 2025 is deliberately timed ahead of COP30, the next UN climate summit, to be held in Belém in Brazil’s Amazon region. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has branded it a “COP of Truth”, arguing in a recent interview that decades of broken promises on emissions cuts and climate finance have eroded public trust. The new UN report gives negotiators a stark backdrop: after three rounds of national pledges under the Paris Agreement, the world is still badly “off target”, and a temporary overshoot of 1.5°C is now baked in.

Yet the report is not purely a message of doom. UNEP and other scientific bodies stress that proven solutions already exist and are getting cheaper quickly. For the first time, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar produced more electricity globally than coal in the first half of 2025, according to figures cited in UNEP’s executive director’s statement. The same statement highlights that tackling methane from fossil fuels and agriculture can cut warming faster in the short term, buying time while CO₂ emissions fall. Analysts at the Copenhagen Climate Centre and elsewhere point out that if governments fully implement their existing net-zero pledges and accelerate the roll-out of clean technologies, it is still possible to bend the curve closer to 1.5–2°C, as UNEP’s Emissions Gap overview makes clear.

The uncomfortable conclusion from this year’s Emissions Gap Report is that the world has inched forward but is still racing toward danger. The science has crystallised what is at stake: a world 2.3–2.8°C hotter than pre-industrial times would mean unlivable heat in many cities, major crop failures, more frequent megafires and floods, and mounting losses that many communities cannot adapt to. The UN’s own climate science pages underline that every fraction of a degree matters, because each tiny slice of avoided warming represents lives not lost, homes not washed away and species not pushed over the brink. The latest “report card” from the UN shows slight progress – but unless governments use this decade to radically accelerate emissions cuts, the grade the planet gets in 2035 could be catastrophic.