The distance from the Paris climate change goals keeps growing

On the current course, warming would reach 2.6 degrees by the end of the century and keep climbing in the decades after that.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published its climate change report, the Emissions Gap Report 2026: The Point of Return, on Wednesday, October 21. This is the annual assessment of the gap between the goals set by the Paris Agreement in 2015 and the commitments governments have made. 

“The chance of holding global warming to below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels with no or limited overshoot is gone,” the report states. It has been lost to “decades of insufficient climate action.”

In the 2026 edition, the agency outlines the path that would manage to keep the rise in temperature below 1.7–1.8 degrees and bring it back down to 1.5 degrees by 2100. “To get on such a pathway,” it explains, “global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be reduced by 18 per cent by 2030, 45 per cent by........

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