Despite new national policies submitted ahead of the United Nations COP30 climate conference in Belém, Brazil, the world remains on track for a disastrous 2.6°C of fossil fuel-driven warming, according to an annual analysis released on Thursday.
Climate Action Tracker (CAT) said the 2025 report marked the fourth year in a row in which there had been “little to no measurable progress” in its warming predictions for 2100 based on the current policies and commitments of 40 countries.
“The world is running out of time to avoid a dangerous overshoot of the 1.5°C limit,” Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare said in a statement. “Delayed action has already led to higher cumulative emissions, and new evidence suggests the climate system may be more sensitive than previously thought. Without rapid, deep emissions cuts—over 50% by 2030—overshooting 1.5°C becomes ever more likely, with severe consequences for people and ecosystems.”
Under the Paris Agreement, countries are required to submit nationally determined contributions (NDCs) every five years outlining their plans to slash greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis. However, CAT found that nearly none of the 40 countries it analyzed had updated their 2030 NDCs or announced sufficiently ambitious 2035 NDCs ahead of COP30, which began on Monday. This means that the projected warming based on 2030 and 2035 targets remained at 2.6°C above preindustrial levels.
“We have said it before, and we will keep saying it: We are running out of time.”
“A world at 2.6°C means global disaster,” Hare told The Guardian, adding that it would likely trigger key tipping points such as the death of coral reefs, the transformation of the Amazon rainforest into grassland, the destabilizing of ice sheets, and the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
“That all means the end of agriculture in the UK and across Europe, drought and monsoon failure in Asia and Africa, lethal heat and humidity,” Hare explained. “This is not a good place to be. You want to stay away from that.”
CAT also made temperature projections based on existing policies and actions; pledges and targets, including binding long-term targets; and an optimistic scenario including net-zero targets. In 2025, the temperature projection for existing policies dropped from 2.7°C to 2.6°C, mostly due to a change in methodology, and the “optimistic scenario” remained the same at 1.9°C. However, the “pledges and targets” projection increased from 2.1°C to 2.2°C, predominately due to President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.
Other major carbon polluters China and the European Union did not update their plans with the ambition required to meet the Paris goals.
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The analysis comes a week after the UN Environment Programme released its Emissions Gap Report, which found that NDCs put the world on track for 2.3-2.5°C of warming, while current policies put it on track for 2.8°C.
Overall, CAT blamed the lack of progress on the continued growth of fossil fuel production and use. It noted that several major countries had continued to expand fossil fuels, from India, China, and Indonesia building more coal plants to Japan and Saudi Arabia championing gas as a “bridge fuel.”
“Worst of all,” the report authors wrote, “the United States is actively shutting down offshore wind projects, rolling back renewable energy incentives, cutting curbs on carbon pollution, and actively expanding oil and gas production.”
However, despite their grim projections, CAT did see hope in the massive rollout of renewable energy, which generated more power than coal for the first time in 2025.
“While not at the pace needed, our analysis shows that the Paris Agreement works,” said Niklas Höhne, of CAT partner the NewClimate Institute, in a statement.
Höhne continued:
Back in 2015, our current policies scenario led to 3.6°C of warming by 2100. Today, 10 years later, our latest projections show that this has been reduced by roughly 1°C to around 2.6°C. The Paris Agreement has rewritten the rules of global climate action—sparking investment, innovation, and reforms that would simply not have happened without it.
But governments need to speed up the pace now. Although emissions have risen, the exponential pace of the renewable energy expansion allows us to now reduce emissions much faster than previously thought. Governments can strengthen or overachieve 2030 targets, implement robust policies, and ensure transparency and accountability to deliver on the Paris Agreement promise and safeguard a sustainable future.
The faster governments act, the faster they can close the “targets gap” between current emissions and how far they have to fall to keep the 1.5°C goal within reach. This gap is expected to grown by as many as 2 billion metric tons between 2030 and 2035 alone.
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CAT said that current research indicates that implementing the most ambitious policies could limit peak warming to 1.7°C. This could be achieved by reaching net-zero carbon dioxide emissions before 2050, reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the 2060s, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Under this scenario, global temperatures would return to below 1.5°C by the end of the century.
“We have said it before, and we will keep saying it: We are running out of time,” said report lead author Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga.
“Every new fossil gas deal the EU makes, every new coal plant built in China, every fossil gas expansion project in Australia, every exported barrel from Norway, every tonne of LNG Japan pushes into neighboring Asian countries, costs billions to people elsewhere in the world as they deal with increasingly extreme weather events,” Gonzales-Zuñiga continued. “These are not abstract policy choices—they are physical realities with human consequences. The atmosphere does not negotiate, and it does not wait.”
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