On climate, a long road back to Paris

The scale of the challenge becomes clear when the projected reductions are measured against the climate action plans countries submitted under the Paris Agreement.

When climate delegates meet at the next CoP in about two weeks, they will need to summon greater resolve than in the past to get the Paris Pact back on track.

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2 min readOct 23, 2026 06:05 AM IST First published on: Oct 23, 2026 at 06:05 AM IST

The writing has been on the wall for at least three years: The Paris Pact’s goal of keeping global temperature rise down to 1.5°C above industrial levels will be unattainable in the near term. The United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) “Emissions Gap Report 2026”, released on Wednesday, underlines this. It sets out what it would take to return to the Paris threshold by the end of the century. Under a scenario designed to achieve the lowest possible overshoot, global warming would peak at 1.7-1.8°C around 2050 before returning to 1.5°C in the next half a decade. This pathway requires global GHG emissions to fall by 18 per cent by 2030, 45 per cent by 2035 and 69 per cent by 2040, relative to 2025 levels.

The scale of the challenge becomes clear when the projected reductions are measured against the climate action plans countries submitted under the Paris Agreement. The full implementation of these would reduce global emissions by only 5-8 per cent by 2030 and 11-15 per cent by 2035, relative to 2025 levels — well short of the reductions suggested by UNEP. The report mentions futuristic technologies like carbon storage. But the jury is out on their costs. The Emissions Report’s renewable energy targets, too, are demanding, but solar and wind power growth in the past decade offer reasons for optimism. Installations have increased 2.5 times since the Paris Agreement. According to UNEP, they will need to surge by three times above 2025 levels in the next 10 years. Technological progress and falling costs can support such a transition. The more difficult task will be to shield the market from geopolitics, especially to ensure clean energy can be stored.

Climate-related damage cannot be ruled out, at least in the immediate future. The question, then, is how to compensate the most vulnerable. The shortcomings of the Loss and Damage Fund, formalised three years ago, were evident in its failure to aid Nepal after floods in August. When climate delegates meet at the next CoP in about two weeks, they will need to summon greater resolve than in the past to get the Paris Pact back on track.