UN report: 2025 emissions at record levels, world on track for 2.6°C by 2100

Record emissions and a warmer outlook

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released its annual emissions gap report on 21 October 2026, finding that global greenhouse gas emissions stayed at record levels in 2025. Emissions were broadly similar to the year before, but the agency's analysts stopped short of calling 2025 a peak, citing large geopolitical uncertainties and a growing reliance on fossil fuels despite strong growth in renewables. The report says the 1.5°C limit, the most ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, can no longer be held without overshoot. UNEP executive director Inger Andersen said governments had been warned for years that time was running out.

Pledges and current policies

If countries deliver the emissions cuts they have promised, the world would still warm to 2.6°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, according to the report. Under current policies alone, without counting any further commitments to cut emissions, warming would reach 2.8°C. Both projections are higher than last year's range of 2.3°C to 2.5°C, a shift the report partly attributes to the formal withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement and to revised estimates of historical emissions. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said national climate plans and current policies are dangerously insufficient, pointing to warming between 2.6°C and 2.8°C.

The United States and the 2025 increase

Preliminary 2025 data show emissions rising in the United States, Indonesia and China, and falling in India, Russia and the European Union. The report puts the United States' increase at 133 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent, more than any other country, driven by higher electricity demand and a rebound in coal power generation. The 124 countries that raised emissions added 189 million tons of carbon dioxide, and 70% of that increase came from the United States. Another 63 countries reduced emissions, most of them European. Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics and not part of the report, said its calculations were scientifically sound, as several other outside scientists did, and he criticised the US approach in strong terms:

It is looking at the fire, denying there is a fire, and then pouring more petrol on it.

Path back toward 1.5°C

The report models a scenario in which warming peaks at 1.7°C to 1.8°C and then falls back to 1.5°C by 2100. That requires global emissions to fall 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040, measured against 2025 levels, along with large-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Adnkronos gives 2045 for the 45% cut, while other reports give 2035. Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and co-author of the report, says this minimal overshoot scenario is technically and economically feasible, though the measures it proposes are ambitious. Staying below the Paris ceiling of 2°C by 2100 would require a 37% cut by 2040, according to De Standaard.

Current pledges and what follows

Current commitments would cut emissions only 5% to 8% by 2030 and 11% to 15% by 2035, according to UN figures cited by ANSA-AFP. That leaves a wide gap with the 18% cut the 1.5°C pathway needs by 2030. The report calls for drastic and immediate efforts, with the goal now being to minimise how long and how far warming overshoots. The report was released ahead of COP31, which will be held in Turkey from 9 to 20 November 2026.