Five years of stalled climate action leave the world on course for 2.7°C of warming
An assessment released during COP31 finds that current policies have barely shifted the global trajectory since 2021. Meeting governments’ 2030 and 2035 targets would still fall far short of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit.
Clean power is meeting a growing share of electricity demand. Yet the world is still not cutting emissions fast enough to avoid dangerous warming. The gap between technological progress and government action is the central finding of the Climate Action Tracker’s (CAT) update, released Thursday, November 12, during the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey.
Under policies already in force, CAT projects 2.7°C of global warming by 2100 relative to preindustrial levels. Last year’s estimate was 2.6°C. The researchers caution, however, that much of the one-tenth-of-a-degree change reflects updated historical data and refinements to their projections, rather than an equivalent shift in government policy. Their broader conclusion is that the global outlook has been largely stuck for five years.
Even if countries meet all their stated 2030 and 2035 targets, projected warming falls only to 2.6°C. Meeting additional long-term commitments would bring it to 2.1°C. CAT’s most optimistic scenario, which assumes full implementation of every pledge, including net-zero targets, reaches 1.9°C by the end of the century. These are conditional scenarios, not predictions of an unavoidable future.
CAT is a research initiative run by Climate Analytics and the NewClimate Institute. Climate Analytics policy analyst Sarah Heck leads the authors of this update. Its assessment broadly echoes the UN Environment Programme’s 2026 Emissions Gap Report, which also estimated 2.6°C of warming if national climate pledges are fully implemented. The two groups’ figures differ in some other scenarios because their methods and assumptions are not identical.
The distance between pledges and cuts
The 1.5°C threshold does not describe the temperature on any particular day. It is the long-term warming limit that governments agreed to pursue under the Paris Agreement. CAT says crossing it around 2030 is now difficult to avoid. What remains within human control is how far temperatures rise beyond that level and how long they stay there. Delaying emissions cuts worsens both.
The apparent contradiction in recent years helps explain the stalled outlook. According to CAT, clean electricity met all the growth in global power demand in 2025. China and India continued adding renewable capacity at record pace, while electric-vehicle adoption climbed. But overall energy demand also rose, and investment in oil, gas and coal infrastructure continued. Taken together, those developments have yet to bring global emissions down.
CAT calculates that a pathway limiting the extent of the overshoot would require emissions to fall by about 4% a year through 2030, 7% a year in the first half of the 2030s and 9% a year from 2035 to 2050. Those rates describe what its model says is needed; they are not targets governments have already agreed to meet.
The researchers point to five areas for action: moving away from fossil fuels, cutting methane, expanding renewable power and electrification, ending deforestation, and removing carbon dioxide as a supplement to emissions cuts, never as a substitute. Whether warming ends up closer to 2.7°C or on a lower path depends on decisions about investment and regulation, as well as the declarations negotiated in Antalya.
For countries facing drought, flooding and rising seas, every fraction of a degree matters. Thursday’s findings do not suggest that the energy transition has failed. They show that its gains have not yet outweighed growing demand and continued fossil-fuel use. COP31 now has a clear measure of the task ahead: turn future targets into measurable reductions this decade.
