1.5°C Paris Agreement goal no longer viable
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The gist
UNEP's 2026 Emissions Gap Report says the 1.5°C Paris goal without overshoot is no longer achievable.
Warming past 1.5°C is now called imminent, with COP31 talks due next month.
Background
UNEP (the United Nations Environment Programme), the Nairobi-based UN agency that publishes an annual Emissions Gap Report, released this year's edition, titled "The Point of Return." Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries committed to keeping warming well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Past editions of the report expressed skepticism about meeting 1.5°C; this is the first to pronounce missing the mark "imminent and unavoidable." It lands ahead of the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, next month.
How it unfolded
- Oct 21, 2026UNEP publishes its annual Emissions Gap Report 2026, stating the 1.5°C goal with no or limited overshoot is no longer achievable and that exceeding 1.5°C is "imminent and unavoidable."
- Oct 21, 2026The report finds the lowest-overshoot scenario would peak at 1.7°C to 1.8°C around mid-century, with roughly a 50% chance of returning to 1.5°C or below by 2100.
- Oct 21, 2026It says emissions must fall 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040 relative to 2025 levels to achieve that scenario; full implementation of existing pledges would cut emissions only 5% to 8% by 2030, with peak warming of about 2.6°C.
- Oct 21, 2026Current policies put the world on track for about 2.8°C by 2100, the report finds, higher than last year's estimate partly reflecting the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
- Oct 21, 2026The report notes renewable electricity generation overtook coal globally for the first time in 2025, but global greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 were broadly on par with record 2024 levels.
Who’s saying what
- Official
- UNEP says the opportunity to bridge the 1.5°C gap with no or limited overshoot has been lost, and Executive Director Inger Andersen says the window has closed but can be reopened by making the overshoot as brief as possible.
- Official
- UN Secretary-General António Guterres says "overshoot is not surrender," arguing temperatures can still be brought back below 1.5 degrees by the end of the century and that "the emissions gap is now a leadership gap."
- Expert
- Climate scientist Michael Mann, who was not involved in the report, says each added fraction of a degree of warming can have an "immense" impact "as measured in terms of damage, cost and loss of lives."
- Caution
- Mohamed Adow of Kenya-based think tank Power Shift Africa calls the outcome "a historic failure of political leadership," saying governments have chosen delay over action.
- Party
- Climate-vulnerable developing nations accused bigger emitters of abandoning the Paris goals, with a showdown over the 1.5°C target expected at COP31.
Still unverified
Returning to 1.5°C by 2100 would depend on large-scale carbon removal, the report says, but the feasibility of such removal remains uncertain and the technologies have so far not been proven to work at that scale.