02 September 2026

Earth will breach a long-standing target before the end of the decade, report says.

By

James Dinneen

A cooling station in Cologne, Germany, offered relief during a June heatwave that was exacerbated by climate change. Credit: Ina Fassbender/AFP/GettyThe goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 ºC to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change is officially dead. According to a report1 released today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the best the planet can hope for on its current emissions trajectory is warming of about 1.8 ºC above pre-industrial levels this century.“Obviously, yes, we have climate procrastinated,” Inger Andersen, UNEP’s executive director, said during a briefing on 1 September. “And obviously, yes … when we started UNFCCC [the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change], we knew what action had to be taken. And we have not taken it at the speed that we could have.”Climate change is speeding up — the pace nearly doubled in ten yearsThe nearly 200 countries that signed the Paris climate accord in 2015 agreed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions fast enough to keep the rise in global average temperatures well below 2 ºC relative to the pre-industrial average, with an ambitious goal of limiting the rise to 1.5 ºC. Beyond that 1.5 ºC threshold, the risks of triggering dangerous tipping points in the climate system grow more acute2, and rise with every tenth of a degree of warming, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).The 1.5 ºC target has remained a prominent goal of UN climate negotiations even though countries have failed to make the steep cuts that would have been needed to achieve it. The theme of the UN climate summit in Glasgow, UK, in 2021, was to ‘keep 1.5 ºC alive’, and the UN climate meeting last year in Brazil ended with a resolution “to keep 1.5 ºC within reach”, even though researchers pointed out that global average temperatures in 2024 had surpassed 1.5 ºC above pre-industrial levels for the first time. The long-term average used to define the target is now expected to breach 1.5 ºC by the end of the decade.Over the threshold