The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has released its 2026 Emissions Gap Report, titled "The Point of Return," which concludes that the 1.5°C warming limit established by the 2015 Paris Agreement is no longer achievable within a single decade. According to the report, the window to bridge the emissions gap with "no or limited" overshoot has closed, making an exceedance of the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels imminent and inevitable.
The image illustrates the industrial activities and emissions that the report seeks to reduce to meet climate targets.
Because exceeding this threshold increases the risk of irreversible changes to ice sheets, permafrost, and ocean circulation, the UNEP suggests a revised strategy: ensuring global warming remains below 2°C as a primary objective, with the long-term goal of returning to 1.5°C by the end of the century. To meet these revised targets, the report specifies that global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035, and 69% by 2040 relative to 2025 levels. Currently, even if existing nationally determined contributions (NDCs) are fully implemented, emissions are projected to fall by only 5% to 8% by 2030.
To bridge this gap, the UN Secretary General identified several necessary levers, including tripling renewable energy capacity by 2035 and significantly reducing the shares of coal, oil, and gas in energy production. Specifically, the report calls for reducing coal, oil, and gas shares by 55%, 15%, and 5% respectively by 2035, and by 75%, 30%, and 35% by 2040. Additionally, the report estimates that 320 gigatons of CO2—roughly eight times the emissions recorded in 2024—must be removed from the atmosphere by the end of the century through a combination of biological solutions like reforestation and technological approaches such as carbon mineralization and underground storage.
This visual represents the biological solutions, such as reforestation, mentioned as a method for carbon removal.