World
still on track for catastrophic 2.6C temperature rise, report finds
Fossil
fuel emissions have hit a record high while many nations have done too little
to avert deadly global heating
Oliver
Milman and Damian Carrington
Thu 13
Nov 2025 00.01 GMT
The world
is still on track for a catastrophic 2.6C increase in temperature as countries
have not made sufficiently strong climate pledges, while emissions from fossil
fuels have hit a record high, two major reports have found.
Despite
their promises, governments’ new emission-cutting plans submitted for the Cop30
climate talks taking place in Brazil have done little to avert dangerous global
heating for the fourth consecutive year, according to the Climate Action
Tracker update.
The world
is now anticipated to heat up by 2.6C above preindustrial times by the end of
the century – the same temperature rise forecast last year.
This
level of heating easily breaches the thresholds set out in the Paris climate
pact, which every country agreed to, and would set the world spiralling into a
catastrophic new era of extreme weather and severe hardships.
A
separate report found the fossil fuel emissions driving the climate crisis will
rise by about 1% this year to hit a record high, but that the rate of rise has
more than halved in recent years.
The past
decade has seen emissions from coal, oil and gas rise by 0.8% a year compared
with 2.0% a year during the decade before. The accelerating rollout of
renewable energy is now close to supplying the annual rise in the world’s
demand for energy, but has yet to surpass it.
A tourist
poses for a picture with COP30 mascot inside the Estacao das Docas, a tourist
port area in Belém.
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“A world
at 2.6C means global disaster,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. A
world this hot would probably trigger major “tipping points” that would cause
the collapse of key Atlantic Ocean circulation, the loss of coral reefs, the
long-term deterioration of ice sheets and the conversion of the Amazon
rainforest to a savannah.
“That all
means the end of agriculture in the UK and across Europe, drought and monsoon
failure in Asia and Africa, lethal heat and humidity,” said Hare. “This is not
a good place to be. You want to stay away from that.”
The world
has already heated up by about 1.3C since the Industrial Revolution due to
deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, a situation that has already
unleashed fiercer storms, wildfires, droughts and other calamities.
Under the
Paris deal, signed in 2016, countries are meant to periodically update their
plans to slash emissions, with new submissions of so-called nationally
determined contributions (NDCs) expected for this round of UN climate talks
currently under way in Belém, Brazil.
But only
about 100 countries have done so, with the cuts envisioned very much
insufficient to address the climate crisis.
Under a
scenario that considers countries’ net zero targets as well as NDCs, the
outlook has slightly worsened, with global heating moving from 2.1C to 2.2C by
the end of the century, according to the Climate Action Tracker, largely
because of the US’s withdrawal from the Paris climate deal.
Donald
Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax”, torn up climate policies at home
and agitated for more oil and gas drilling in America and overseas. For the
first time, the US has not sent a delegation to a Cop summit, to the relief of
some delegates.
While the
rate of global heating is still dangerously high, the expected levels have come
down since the Paris deal, when about 3.6C of heating by 2100 was expected.
This is due to an explosion in the rate of clean energy deployment and a
decline in the use of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels.
However,
an assessment released simultaneously by the Global Carbon Project (GCP) found
emissions from fossil fuels are still projected to rise by about 1% in 2025.
The new
analyses also show a worrying weakening of the planet’s natural carbon sinks.
The
scientists said the combined effects of global heating and the felling of trees
have turned tropical forests in southeast Asia and large parts of South America
from overall CO2 sinks into sources of the climate-heating gas.
There was
a global agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels at Cop28 in Dubai in
2023, but the issue is always contested at the UN meetings.
On
Tuesday, the G77 group of nations plus China, representing approximately 80% of
the world’s population, announced support for an agreed process at Cop30 to
support a just transition away from fossil fuels – though other countries
(including Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, the UK and the EU) did not support
it.
Brazil
has established an investment fund to tackle deforestation, but many countries,
including the UK, have not signed up to it.
Former US
vice-president Al Gore told delegates that it is “literally insane that we are
allowing [global heating] to continue”.
“How long
are we going to stand by and keep turning the thermostat up so that these sort
of events get even worse?” he said.
“We need
to adapt as well as mitigate, but we also need to be realistic that if we allow
this insanity to continue, to use the sky as an open sewer, that some things
will be very difficult to adapt to.”
Prof
Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia, one of the 130 GCP
scientists, said: “We’re not yet in a situation where emissions are going down
as rapidly as they need to to tackle climate change, but at the same time
emissions are growing much less rapidly than before because of the
extraordinary growth in renewable energy.
“It is
clear that climate policy and actions work – we are able globally to bend these
curves.”
She said
35 countries, representing a quarter of the global GDP, now have growing
economies but falling emissions. This has been the case in Europe and the US
for some years, but these nations have now been joined by Australia, Jordan,
South Korea and others.
The
report projects that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will reach 425ppm
(parts per million) in 2025, compared with 280ppm in the preindustrial era. It
would have been 8ppm lower if the carbon sinks had not been weakened.
The GCP
projection for 2025 is based on monthly data up to September and has proven
accurate in the previous 19 annual reports.
Romain
Ioualalen, at Oil Change International, said: “The countries meeting at Cop30
need to double down on renewable energy and start planning for an accelerated
phaseout of fossil fuel production and use.”
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