Global Warming Action as 1.5°C Limit Nears but Hope Remains if Governments Act Fast
A new assessment from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that current national climate pledges could push global temperatures to around 2.3°C to 2.5°C above pre-industrial levels, a rise that scientists say would unleash extreme weather events and cause irreversible harm to vital ecosystems.
According to reporting by The Guardian, researchers from Climate Analytics believe this trajectory could still be reversed. Their analysis suggests that global warming could peak at 1.7°C before 2050 and fall back to 1.5°C by the end of the century, if fossil fuels are rapidly phased out and carbon-removal technologies are widely deployed to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere.
Scientists caution that even a temporary overshoot of 1.5°C would heighten the risk of crossing dangerous climate tipping points, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet or the transformation of the Amazon rainforest from a carbon sink into a major carbon source.
Bill Hare, the chief executive of Climate Analytics, described the current situation as a “woeful political failure,” warning that every additional fraction of a degree of warming increases the risk of irreversible damage. Still, he said, it remains possible to bring global temperatures back below 1.5°C by 2100 if immediate action is taken.
The UNEP analysis found that existing national climate plans—known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—would deliver only about a 10% reduction in carbon emissions by 2035, far below what’s needed. To stay within a 1.7°C limit, global emissions must fall by about 20% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels, and continue declining by roughly 11% per year throughout the 2030s. Methane emissions would also need to drop by 30% by 2035.
Neil Grant, a senior expert at Climate Analytics, noted that while the past five years have cost the world valuable time in combating climate change, the period has also seen major advances in renewable energy and battery technologies. “Riding this tailwind,” he said, “can help turbocharge the clean-energy transition and make up for lost time.”
World leaders are gathering this week in Belém, Brazil, ahead of the Cop30 UN climate summit, to discuss how to strengthen global commitments. The Climate Analytics report calls for a rapid expansion of renewable energy and electrification across transport, heating, and industry—warning that global temperatures have already exceeded 1.5°C for the past two consecutive years.
