Chart of the day: Scientists slam emissions reduction “flatline,” say warming overshoot imminent

Detailed summary

The world clocked up its hottest October on record last month, and 2026 will just fall shy of 2024 as the world’s warmest. Its anomaly compared with pre-industrial times was 1.6°C…

The world is on track to emit 38.2 billion tonnes of fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions this year, just 0.4% less than for 2025 and a far slower pace than needed to arrest dangerous climate change, according to the 2026 Global Carbon Budget.

The report was released just as climate negotiators begin a fortnight of talks at the annual global climate summit, held this year in Antalya, Türkiye.

It reinforces the theme of the International Energy Agency’s report from last week that found renewable energy demand was rising because of the US-Israel war on Iran, crimping overall fossil fuel use.

Emissions from oil will likely shrink 1.9% this year, while two-thirds of the increase in the world’s increasing energy demand is coming from solar and wind plants, and from rising use of electric vehicles, the GCB report states.

Recent declines in emissions reductions have been associated with major crises, such as the Covid pandemic and the global finance crisis of about 15 years ago.

“A decline in fossil CO2 emissions is encouraging, but a reduction driven partly by geopolitical shocks is not a sustainable climate solution.” said Professor Pierre Friedlingstein,director of the Global Carbon Budget Office at the University of Exeter’s, who led the study.

“The long-term answer remains the rapid deployment of clean energy technologies.”

“The picture from the Global Carbon Budget is a flatline, not a decline – a projected fall of just 0.4% in 2026, a figure that is unfortunately statistically indistinguishable from zero,” he said on Tuesday.

“Observed warming reached 1.37°C above pre-industrial levels in 2025. With the long-term warming trend running at close to 0.3°C per decade, we are heading towards a sustained breach of 1.5°C by around 2030.

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