The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) today warned that every fraction of an increase in global temperature increases the impacts and climate risks, and called for “every effort” to curb warming.
“Each additional fraction of a degree and each additional year of warming above 1.5°C (relative to pre-industrial average levels) increase the impacts and climate risks, such as deadly floods, heatwaves, and wildfires that have afflicted many nations this year,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP, regarding the agency’s annual report on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).
The document released today warns that the goal of keeping global warming below 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels has already been exceeded, and that the world must now minimize the magnitude of the overshoot and strive to return to the 1.5°C limit by the end of the century.
“This is possible,” said Inger Andersen, recalling “success stories” that demonstrate that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced rapidly.
The UN report analyzes a scenario in which the 1.5°C cap is not greatly exceeded, but it also says that if current policies remain, global warming could reach 2.8°C above pre-industrial levels within this century and continue to rise.
And even if all promises and commitments by countries to cut GHG emissions are fulfilled, warming will reach 2.6°C, potentially falling to 2.1°C in a very optimistic scenario.
The results now presented, the UN says, are worse than last year’s projections, notably due to the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Without urgent action, keeping the warming peak below 1.7°C to 1.8°C “will become rapidly impossible,” the institution warns in the report, adding that returning to the 1.5°C limit is possible mainly because there is evidence worldwide that climate policies can reduce, and have reduced, emissions.
Although successes are concentrated in sectors, countries and specific periods, the UN cites examples of policies in the electricity sector that reduced emissions by 9%, or economic instruments that achieved reductions between 5% and 13%.
“To reach a trajectory of overshoot beyond 1.5°C with the lowest possible limit requires replicating, expanding and sustaining these successes,” the report states, noting that nations agreed to triple renewable energy capacity and to halt and reverse deforestation, among other measures, and that the reality is that the path is in the “wrong direction.”
According to UNEP, if current policy scenarios project that some emissions will stabilize by 2030, none of them show reductions happening at the pace and scale needed to minimize the magnitude and duration of the 1.5°C overshoot.
In the Emissions Gap Report 2026, a range of scenarios, targets and estimates are drawn, from expanding renewable energy to reducing the use of coal, oil and gas in total energy supply or reducing methane emissions.
But the document warns that for a less bad scenario above 1.5°C, stringent and urgent cuts in emissions and the removal of carbon dioxide at an increasingly large scale are necessary, something on the order of 320 gigatonnes, the equivalent of eight years of emissions this century.
The report concludes that with each additional fraction of a degree and each additional year of warming above 1.5°C, climate risks will rise, including irreversible changes to the polar caps, to permafrost (permanently frozen ground), or to ocean circulation, with grave implications for human health and prosperity.
The only option, the UN warns, is to minimize the duration and magnitude of the overshoot and to establish a credible pathway back to 1.5°C by the end of the century.
