UN Report Says the World Is on Track for 2.8°C of Warming and Must Cut Emissions 18% by 2030 to Return to 1.5°C
The Emissions Gap Report 2026 says projections worsened partly because of the U.S. exit from the Paris Agreement. The U.S. government, in a statement included in the report, said it 'does not endorse or agree' with it.
Global warming is set to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and returning to that threshold by the end of the century would require cutting greenhouse gas emissions 18% by 2030 and 45% by 2035 from 2025 levels, the United Nations Environment Programme said in a report released in Nairobi on Wednesday, Oct. 21.
The Emissions Gap Report 2026, titled "The Point of Return," examines what UNEP calls a "lowest possible" overshoot scenario, in which peak warming around mid-century is held to 1.7 to 1.8 degrees Celsius and temperatures are brought back to or below 1.5 degrees by 2100, with about a 50% chance. Reaching that path would also require a 69% cut by 2040, the report says.
Current national pledges fall far short. Full implementation of countries' Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement would reduce emissions only 5% to 8% by 2030 and 11% to 15% by 2035, relative to 2025, according to UNEP. The required pace, an average annual reduction of 5.7% from 2025 to 2035, is steeper than the roughly 5% annual cuts in earlier pathways from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
If current policies continue, warming could reach 2.8 degrees Celsius this century and keep rising afterward, the report finds. If all pledges are delivered, warming would be limited to 2.6 degrees. Those outcomes are worse than last year's projections "due to the withdrawal of the United States of America from the Paris Agreement and revised estimates of historical emissions," UNEP said, while new pledges submitted since last year made "a negligible difference."
Even in the most optimistic scenario, in which all pledges plus additional net-zero targets are met, warming would be limited to 2.1 degrees this century. Every five years of carbon dioxide emissions at current levels pushes peak warming up by about 0.1 degree, the report says.
The overshoot scenario also depends on pulling carbon out of the air. It would require removing and permanently storing about 320 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide over the century, equivalent to about eight years of 2024's global emissions, and UNEP said socioeconomic and technological challenges make achieving that uncertain.
"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," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a message on the report.
"Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5°C increases climate impacts and risks, such as the deadly floods, heatwaves and wildfires that have plagued many nations this year," said Inger Andersen, UNEP's executive director. "So, we must pull out all the stops to minimize peak warming and return to 1.5°C by the end of the century. This is possible."
The report points to evidence that policies work. More than 220 policy evaluations show that measures in the electricity sector cut emissions an average of 9%, and that economic instruments such as cap-and-trade programs and carbon taxes achieved reductions of 5% to 13% across sectors, UNEP said. Renewable energy has boomed since the Paris Agreement, and coal and oil supply has grown more slowly than projected. But those successes remain concentrated in specific sectors, countries and periods, and indicators for energy, road transport and methane emissions are "heading in the wrong direction," the report says.
The United States stands out. NPR reported that the U.S. was the only major economy where planet-warming pollution increased dramatically last year, while global emissions were basically flat. U.S. emissions grew because of rising electricity demand and administration policies supporting fossil fuels, including orders keeping coal plants open longer, rollbacks of vehicle fuel-efficiency standards and the end of tax credits for solar and wind projects, according to NPR. Among the world's largest emitters, the U.S. and Russia had the highest per-capita emissions last year.
"Right now, everybody is scrambling a little bit regarding energy security," Andersen told NPR, pointing to oil and gas disruptions from the wars in Ukraine and Iran. She said "several G20 members have shown sustained emissions reduction," including the European Union.
The report includes a statement from the U.S. government saying it "does not endorse or agree with its analysis or conclusions, and has not provided comments to this report," NPR reported. The administration has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and is working to remove the U.S. from all U.N. climate work.
The report comes less than a month before global climate talks begin in Turkey, which the Trump administration will not attend, according to NPR. "All countries, especially the big emitters, must do more," Guterres said. "Every fraction of a degree matters."
