Based on the latest United Nations assessment, the world can no longer avoid temporarily exceeding the 1.5°C global warming target, making deep and urgent emissions cuts critical to minimizing the duration and severity of this climate overshoot .
According to the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) annual Emissions Gap Report, the failure of nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough has made breaching the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C goal inevitable . UNEP's executive director, Inger Andersen, stated that nations have had three attempts to deliver on their promises and have missed the mark each time .
While deep, immediate emissions cuts could delay when this threshold is crossed, they can no longer prevent it entirely . The report concludes that the world is now certain to exceed the 1.5°C limit, at least temporarily .
The persistent gap between climate pledges and necessary action is at the heart of the problem. Global greenhouse gas emissions climbed to a record 57.7 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2024, a 2.3% increase from the previous year . This growth rate is more than four times higher than the average throughout the 2010s .
Current national pledges and policies remain insufficient. If all existing climate plans are fully implemented, the world is still on a path to warm between 2.3°C and 2.5°C this century . Should countries fail to even meet these pledges, and only continue with their current policies, warming could reach a catastrophic 2.8°C to 3.1°C .
The 1.5°C target is not an arbitrary number; it represents a threshold beyond which climate impacts become significantly more severe and irreversible . The difference between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming is substantial. For instance, at 2°C, the proportion of the global population exposed to extreme heat would more than double compared to 1.5°C . While at least 70% of coral reefs would be lost at 1.5°C, 99% would be destroyed at 2°C .
Every fraction of a degree matters, as it increases the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points, such as the collapse of major ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica or the transformation of the Amazon rainforest into a savannah .
This sobering assessment adds immense pressure to the upcoming COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil. The UN report makes it clear that the new goal must be to make the overshoot of the 1.5°C target as "temporary and minimal as possible" . This will require a "quantum leap in ambition and action," starting with the new round of national climate pledges due in 2025 .
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has emphasized the need to change course, stating, "It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible" .
Despite the grim outlook, the report highlights that collective action has made a difference. A decade ago, before the Paris Agreement, the world was heading for a 4°C temperature rise; current pledges have lowered that projection to 2.4-2.6°C . For the first time, projections suggest China's emissions could peak as early as 2025, thanks to renewable energy growth outpacing overall power demand .
Technically, it is still possible to get back on a 1.5°C pathway, but this would require an unprecedented global mobilization and a more than six-fold increase in climate mitigation investment .