UN report: the 1.5°C target is gone — urgent emissions cuts needed to avert a more dangerous climate future

The UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2026: The Point of Return — Urgent emissions cuts needed to come back from overshoot of 1.5°C warns that the opportunity to limit global warming to 1.5°C without overshooting that threshold has been lost, but the future remains critically dependent on decisions taken today. Governments can still limit peak warming, shorten the period of overshoot and return to 1.5°C by 2100. To follow the report’s lowest-overshoot pathway, global greenhouse-gas emissions must be cut by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040, all relative to 2025 levels. By contrast, countries’ new national climate pledges (NDCs, or nationally determined contributions) would reduce emissions by only 5–8% by 2030 and 11–15% by 2035. Global emissions in 2025 remained broadly comparable to 2024, as rising fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions were offset by reductions associated with land use and forestry. The report also finds that fewer than half of G20 members are on track to close their emissions-reduction implementation gaps.

The report’s comparison of new national pledges shows substantial differences between major economies. The European Union, China and Russia are among those projecting reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2035 relative to their pledged 2030 levels, while India’s projected emissions increase. The United States is absent from this particular comparison because it had no active 2035 pledge included in the report’s assessment, yet it remains the world’s largest historical emitter of carbon dioxide, as illustrated in Figure 2.2. The report’s central warning is that current commitments and policies remain insufficient: as a result, urgent and much deeper emissions cuts are needed to reduce the extent and duration of the 1.5°C overshoot and bring global temperatures back down by the end of the century. The UNEP report acknowledges substantial uncertainty in global emissions estimates, but does not explicitly address ‘unreported emissions’ as a distinct category.