Global climate action has stalled for five years, report finds

Report projects an irrecoverable overshoot of the 1.5-degree warming limit

The independent Climate Action Tracker said Thursday that the world has failed to slow or stop global warming over the past five years, because national plans went unrealized and efforts that would have helped were canceled out. The assessment was released during the U.N. climate meeting in Antalya, Turkey, where more government leaders were due to speak Thursday about the state of a warming world and what they hope to do about it.

The report’s central finding is a stall that has now held for half a decade. “Aggregated climate action has now essentially stalled for five consecutive years with positive and negative actions canceling each other out,” the group said. During the first five years after the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world did so much that it trimmed an entire degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) from warming projections — but nothing has changed since, the report said.

Climate change is caused mainly by the release of greenhouse gases, which happens when fuels such as gas, oil and coal are burned, and confronting it means finding ways to drastically cut the amount of emissions put into the atmosphere each year. Countries establish their own plans to reduce emissions, called nationally determined contributions, and both the speed of the reductions and the ways of achieving them differ by country.

Because the collective efforts of countries have not significantly reduced global emissions, the world is now “headed toward an irrecoverable overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius” (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures, according to the report. That figure is the warming threshold the world adopted during the Paris Agreement.

The report also sized up what full compliance with national pledges would deliver. If the nations of the world fulfill all their climate promises — which is a big if — the globe will end the century 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial times. That is the same pace the globe was on in 2024 and 2025, showing that the new set of promises made last year failed to shift projected warming, said report lead author Sarah Heck, a climate policy analyst at Climate Analytics.

“This is still not enough,” Heck said. “Countries really do need to strengthen their targets.”

Those projections rest on how countries set and meet emissions targets. Because those country-level commitments have not so far translated into significant cuts in global emissions, the report concludes that the world is headed toward an irrecoverable overshoot of the 1.5-degree threshold.

Island leaders delivered that message to the rest of the world Wednesday, and more leaders of island nations were expected Thursday to reinforce what to their people is a life-or-death message. Climate change threatens the entire globe through more intense storms, hotter heat waves, worsening droughts and floods; island nations additionally have to watch rising seas swallow up their land.

“Every new oil well drilled, every piece of coal extracted is a threat to my country’s future. The discovery of new fossil fuel resources is not something to celebrate, but something to fear,” Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine said Wednesday. “No one has the right to pollute their neighbors.”

Her colleagues from Tuvalu, the Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, Niue and other islands were expected Thursday to make similar pleas. “It is time to wake up,” said Heine, who recalled coral that she watched go from “bright and lush” to white with bleaching this year. The world’s response to the inevitability of passing the 1.5 warming limit target, she said, “must be overwhelming or the world we know is over.”

To fight climate change, the rich world needs to not just promise more, but also deliver more money to poor nations to help them recover from climate damage and adapt to a warmer world, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said Wednesday.

“Pledges are not payments. But even the promised pledges are now 70% below previous levels,” Mottley told her fellow leaders. “So the applause in this room, let us be clear, has never rebuilt a single home in any country.”

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