5 years of fighting climate change haven’t done much and stronger targets are needed, report says

Detailed summary

The world has failed to slow or stop global warming trends in the past five years because plans weren’t realized and efforts that would have helped ...

ANTALYA, Turkey (AP) — The world has failed to slow or stop global warming trends in the past five years because plans weren’t realized and efforts that would have helped were canceled out, a report said Thursday.

The grim assessment came during a U.N. climate meeting in Antalya, Turkey, where more government leaders were due to speak Thursday about the state of a warming world and what they hope to do about it.

“Aggregated climate action has now essentially stalled for five consecutive years with positive and negative actions canceling each other out,” the independent Climate Action Tracker said in its report. The first five years after the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world did so much that it trimmed an entire degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) from warming projections, but nothing has changed since, the report said.

Climate change is caused mainly by the release of greenhouse gases, which happens when fuels like gas, oil and coal are burned. Confronting climate change means finding ways to drastically cut the amount of emissions put into the atmosphere each year. Countries establish plans to reduce emissions, called nationally determined contributions. The speed of reductions and ways to achieve them are different by country.

Because collective efforts of countries haven’t significantly reduced global emissions, the world is now “headed toward an irrecoverable overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius” (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures, which is the warming threshold the world adopted during the Paris Agreement, according to the report.

The report said if the nations of the world fulfill all their climate promises — which is a big if — the globe will end the century 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial times. That’s the same pace the globe was on in 2024 and 2025, showing the new set of promises made last year have “failed to the move the needle” of projected warming, said report lead author Sarah Heck, a climate…

“T…

Opening of the article, excerpted from Toronto Star. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.