The United Nations has finally said out loud what climate scientists have hinted at for years. In its annual Emissions Gap Report, released in Nairobi on Wednesday, the UN Environment Programme concludes that keeping global heating to 1.5°C without a significant overshoot is no longer achievable. Yet the 2026 edition carries a deliberately hopeful title: The Point of Return.
Rather than mourning the target, the authors model how temperatures could be brought back. Under the most favourable path that remains, the thermometer tops out near 1.7–1.8°C in about the 2050s, then slowly drifts back to 1.5°C or below before the century ends. Even that outcome is only a coin toss, with odds put at about 50 per cent.
The arithmetic is brutal. Getting there means slashing worldwide emissions from their 2025 level by 18% within five years, by 45% within ten and by 69% within fifteen. Current national pledges deliver just 11 to 15 per cent by 2035. On top of that, about 320 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide – some eight years of today’s emissions – would need to be pulled from the air and locked away for good, something nobody can yet guarantee.
If governments stick with existing policies, the planet heads for about 2.8°C this century; honouring every pledge would still mean 2.6°C. Those numbers are worse than a year ago, partly because Washington has quit the Paris Agreement. The report adds a stark rule of thumb: every five years of emissions at today’s level adds roughly a tenth of a degree to the eventual peak.
The UN chief struck a defiant note: “overshoot is not surrender”, Guterres declared. UNEP points to cheaper renewables and to evidence from more than 220 evaluated policies showing that well-designed climate rules do cut emissions.
