Under the Paris Agreement, countries pledged to make an effort to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, in order to avoid intense impacts of climate change.
But that level of warming is now “widely assessed as unavoidable,” according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme titled “Limiting Overshoot.”
Our planet is likely to surpass 1.5°C within the next few years.
The best case scenario—if all national climate plans are fully implemented and net-zero targets reached—is now a world with 1.8°C of warming.
Many countries are not on that path, however. As of 2025, only 15 countries even met the Paris Agreement’s deadline for submitting their plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
More likely is a world with 2.6°C of warming, which the UN says we could hit by 2100 under current policies.
Still, climate experts warn people not to give up on climate actions. Though that reality may seem discouraging, there are still meaningful steps we can take, they say, to avoid “cascading climate impacts.”
And every action matters: though we’ll likely see intense climate impacts, “every fraction of a degree avoided…will save lives, protect ecosystems and reduce economic losses,” per the report.
A 1.5°C world is inevitable—but it isn’t safe
Though we’ve made some global progress to address climate change, these efforts haven’t cut greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough to avoid that 1.5C threshold, per the UNEP report.
That doesn’t mean a world with more than 1.5°C of warming is “safe or acceptable,” it adds: “There are no benign scenarios with global temperature rise above this level.”
Such warming comes with faster sea-level rise; a higher likelihood that ecosystems like coral reefs will collapse; more wildfires and extreme heat; and drastic loss of ice sheets, glaciers, permafrost, and snow.
“While there are uncertainties around the timings and strength of these impacts and tipping points, it is clear they will harm people, societies and economies,” the report reads.
All those impacts will threaten food security and global water supplies; they also raise the risk of deadly pathogens.
Because our emissions reductions haven’t occurred fast enough, pathways to reduced warming that were once available around the time of the Paris Agreement are “no longer feasible.” We would have needed to enact “immediate, deep, and sustained” reductions in greenhouse gas emissions as early as 2015 or 2020.
We need net-negative emissions
Surpassing that 1.5°C threshold is now, essentially, a given.
The global goal is no longer to limit warming in that way, but to get on a pathway of “overshoot, peak and decline,” the UN says—meaning that we keep that warming to the lowest possible level and then bring it down by the end of the century, while implementing climate change adaptation efforts.
Instead of aiming for net-zero emissions, countries will now need to work towards being “net-negative,” via carbon dioxide removal, in order to reverse global warming.
Cutting our greenhouse gas emissions in the first place is still crucial; we can’t emit the same amount of pollution and only rely on carbon capture. Every year of high emissions makes limiting our global warming more difficult, the report says.
And our emissions do remain at record highs: In 2024 alone, fossil fuels and industry produced around 40 gigatons of CO2 (one gigaton is about one billion metric tons).
If we keep that pace, we’ll surpass 1.5°C in just about three years.
We can’t let UN report be a ‘call to apathy’
Along with carbon removal, the UN report emphasizes the need for “transformational adaptation” to protect people and ecosystems from climate change’s impacts.
But the report’s focus on this is concerning to other climate experts.
“Transformational adaptation is distinct from the urgent and growing need to address present and future losses and damages, said Rosanne Martyr of Climate Analytics, a Berlin-headquartered science and policy institute, in a statement.
Climate Analytics worries that the UN report could be a “call to apathy, not to arms.”
“Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” Bill Hare, Climate Analytics CEO and a former lead author on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments, said in a statement.
Though the UNEP report talks about the need to reduce emissions, and frequently notes the role of fossil fuels to produce such emissions, it makes just one mention of the need for a “fossil fuel phase-out.”
“Structural shifts are slow and institutionally and politically challenging,” the report reads, “reinforcing the need to anticipate net-negative targets and avoid fossil fuel lock-in through near-complete phase-out.”
And while the UNEP report says that we must “hold fast to global commitments under the Paris Agreement,” it doesn’t overtly remind governments of their responsibility to deliver on such commitments, Climate Analytics says.
It’s governments’ “repeated failure,” per Climate Analytics, that has made surpassing 1.5C of warming “inevitable.”
