- The 1.5°C limit is gone: UNEP says no pathway exists that avoids overshooting it.
- Full delivery of every country’s current climate pledge still produces about 2.6°C of warming by 2100; today’s policies point to 2.8°C.
- A “lowest possible overshoot” path exists: peak at 1.7–1.8°C around mid-century, back under 1.5°C by 2100 — with only about a 50% chance.
- That path demands emissions fall 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040 versus 2025 — an average of 5.7% every year.
- Global emissions in 2025 sat at 58.4 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, broadly unchanged from the record of 2024.
NAIROBI — The United Nations’ environment agency has stopped mincing words. In the Emissions Gap Report 2026, published on Wednesday, UNEP declares that holding warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels with no or limited overshoot is no longer possible. The overshoot, the report says, is now a matter of degree and duration — and the world has far less control over either than it pretends.
The numbers land hard. If every country fully implemented its current national climate pledges — the Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, the promises governments submitted under the Paris Agreement — global temperatures would still reach roughly 2.6°C by the end of the century. Current policies, without even the pledges fully delivered, point to 2.8°C. Adding every net-zero commitment governments have made would bring the projection down to 2.1°C — still well past the line the world drew in Paris.
What a return to 1.5°C would actually require
The report’s subtitle, The Point of Return, refers to a “lowest possible overshoot” scenario: temperatures peak at 1.7–1.8°C around the middle of the century, then are pulled back down to or below 1.5°C by 2100, with about a 50% probability. Reaching even that precarious path would require global greenhouse-gas emissions to fall 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040, all measured against 2025 levels — an average cut of 5.7% every single year for the next decade.
Current pledges come nowhere near it. UNEP calculates that full NDC implementation would cut emissions by just 5–8% by 2030 and 11–15% by 2035. And the lowest-overshoot scenario depends on removing roughly 320 billion tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere over the course of this century — technology whose feasibility at that scale, the report admits, remains uncertain.
Emissions still haven’t peaked
Global greenhouse-gas emissions reached an estimated 58.4 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2025, broadly unchanged from the record year of 2024. A preliminary estimate shows a marginal decline of 0.1 billion tonnes, but UNEP says the data are too uncertain to conclude that emissions have peaked. Carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion continued to rise, as did fluorinated gases and nitrous oxide — the same super-pollutants leaking from refrigerators, air conditioners and fertilizer use. The only categories that fell were land-use and forestry emissions, driven by fires and deforestation, partly reflecting a quieter wildfire season than in 2024. One calm fire season offset the growth of the entire fossil economy.
The projections have also worsened for a political reason: the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, which UNEP says weighed on the 2.6°C figure.
“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.”
António Guterres, UN Secretary-General
Guterres also warned that “the world can no longer avoid overshooting the 1.5-C limit, and the consequences are already devastating.” UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen added that every fraction of a degree and every extra year above 1.5°C raises the risks of floods, heatwaves and wildfires.
Why this matters beyond the negotiating rooms
Climate reports die in the footnotes; this one should be read by anyone who buys insurance, eats food, or pays taxes. A world that peaks at 1.7–1.8°C before sliding back is not a world that experiences 1.5°C of consequences — it is a world that spends decades above it. Those are the decades when crop insurance becomes unaffordable across the grain belts, when heatwaves rewrite labor law, and when the difference between 1.5°C and 1.8°C is measured in vanished coral reefs and permanently flooded coastlines. The report’s unstated message is that the bill for overshoot will be paid not by negotiators but by households and treasuries, and the longer the peak lasts, the larger the invoice. Temperature records driven by natural cycles on top of human-caused warming have already shown how each added fraction of a degree compounds.
What comes next
UNEP’s prescription is blunt: triple renewable-energy capacity, double the annual rate of energy-efficiency improvement by 2030, accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, and halt deforestation. The next milestone is November’s COP31 climate summit, where countries will face the report’s central accusation — that their pledges, added together, still describe a 2.6°C world. The question the summit cannot dodge is whether any government will bring a pledge that describes something else.
