The world will permanently breach the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C warming limit within about four years if emissions continue at current levels, a major global stocktake of the climate system published Thursday has found.

The fourth annual Indicators of Global Climate Change report, published at the UN climate meetings in Bonn as negotiators begin to lay the groundwork for COP31, shows human-induced warming reached 1.37°C above pre-industrial levels in 2025, rising at 0.27°C per decade, the fastest rate in the historical record.

While individual years have already exceeded 1.5°C, boosted by natural cycles such as El Niño, the report warns that a permanent breach is now fast approaching, with human-caused warming pushing temperatures past the Paris target around 2030.

“The rate of global warming continues at an unprecedented rate,” Dr Chris Smith of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, told the launch press conference. “The level of warming is projected to surpass 1.5°C in about four years.”

The remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C, the total CO2 the world can still emit for an even chance of holding the line against rising temperatures, stood at 130 billion tonnes at the start of 2026. 

At current emission rates, it will be exhausted in a little over three years, the report found.

The budgets for 1.6°C and 1.7°C – enough to trigger catastrophic weather extremes, force millions to flee their homes to seek cooler environments, and wipe out nearly all of the world’s coral reefs – run out in roughly eight and 12 years.

“Human-induced global warming has now reached 1.37°C and continues to rise rapidly, coming ever closer to 1.5°C of global warming,” said Dr Aurélien Ribes, a climate scientist at Météo-France and co-author of the study. 

“Given that greenhouse gas emissions are still on the rise, keeping global warming below this threshold now seems unachievable.”

High temperatures ‘in the pipeline’ 

The report, compiled by some 70 scientists from over 50 institutions in 17 countries, tracks 12  indicators of the climate system using the methods of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its findings aim to bridge the gap between the IPCC’s major assessments, released roughly every seven years, and will feed into the upcoming assessment report due from the UN climate authority in 2028.

Nearly every indicator tracked in the report moved in the wrong direction. The last 11 years are the 11 warmest ever recorded.

Greenhouse gas emissions hit an all-time high of 56.8 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2024, 73% of which originate from fossil fuels.

Atmospheric CO2 reached 425.6 parts per million in 2025, over 50% above pre-industrial levels. Global sea level hit a record 23cm above 1901 levels, and the pace is accelerating as warming oceans expand and land-based ice melts, pushing tides and storm surges higher and further into low-lying coastal areas home to hundreds of millions of people.

The most alarming signal, the authors said, is the Earth’s energy imbalance, which refers to the gap between the heat arriving from the sun and the heat escaping back to space. That imbalance has more than doubled since the late 20th century, and now stands 40% higher than the IPCC assessed just five years ago.

“I’m quite a conservative kind of scientist, but this is potentially indicative of very high temperatures in the pipeline,” said Professor Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds, who leads the annual update.

“Things are getting worse, and getting worse quite rapidly,” Forster said, noting the changes remain within the range projected in the last IPCC report – but at the very top end of it.

Around 90% of that excess heat is absorbed by the oceans. A new indicator added to this year’s report finds the number of days of marine heatwaves globally has more than tripled since 1991, with 65 recorded in 2025. Marine heatwaves bleach coral reefs, kill off the kelp forests and seagrass meadows that shelter marine life, displace the fish stocks that coastal communities depend on, and feed the warm surface waters that fuel hurricanes and storms.

The heat is showing up on land, too. The average hottest day of the year rose to 1.92°C above pre-industrial levels over the last decade, a jump of 0.49°C in just ten years, the report found.

Despite record-breaking temperatures and 2025 coming in as the third-warmest year ever recorded, the scientists stressed the climate is behaving as predicted.

“Unprecedented change doesn’t mean unexpected,” said Dr Tristram Walsh of the University of Oxford, a co-author. “We saw a lot of media coverage that scientists may not know what’s going on with these record temperatures. But if you look at our study, you can clearly see that we really do.”

“This reality check implies increased needs for adaptation as well as risks of losses and damages,” said Dr Valérie Masson-Delmotte, research director at the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace and former co-chair of the IPCC’s physical science working group, “and shows that we are not on track with low emissions scenarios, which are critical to be able to limit future warming and related risks.”

Heat is here 

The human toll of the warming already locked in was underlined in Berlin on the same day, where the World Health Organization launched new guidance on protecting populations from extreme heat.

Heat has killed more than 200,000 people across the European Union and its associated countries in the past four years alone, said Dr Hans Kluge, WHO’s regional director for Europe. Most of the deaths were preventable.

“Heatwaves are no longer freak weather anomalies,” Kluge said. “They are now a recurring crisis inflicting suffering, claiming lives and fracturing our health systems and infrastructure.”

A separate study published in Nature on Thursday found that coastal flooding, once considered a once-in-a-century event, has become around 12 times more frequent worldwide since 1900, with human-driven warming alone quadrupling the likelihood.

Globally, the death toll is already measured in the millions. The latest Lancet Countdown assessment estimated heat exposure now claims 546,000 lives a year, roughly one death every minute, with 84% of the heatwave days people experienced between 2020 and 2024 made more likely or possible by climate change. 

“The reality is the global mean temperature trend isn’t how we experience climate change – it’s in the extremes,” said Dr Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “Heatwaves are getting worse, they’re impacting larger areas, they’re happening earlier, and they’re happening for longer.”

CO2 emissions slowing, but still increasing 

Amid the doom and gloom, the report did contain one genuine piece of good news: while emissions remain at record highs, the growth of CO2 emissions is slowing.

“That doesn’t mean we’re on track yet, but it does mean that policy, technology and societal choices are starting to bend the curve,” said Dr Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “It’s real, and it matters. But slowing growth is not a decline.”

That message lands squarely in the politics of the road to COP31 in Antalya this November, where co-hosts Türkiye and Australia have placed electrification and renewable energy at the centre of the agenda, an approach that conveniently sidesteps the question that broke last year’s COP30 in Belém: a phase-out of fossil fuels themselves.

After petrostates led by Saudi Arabia stripped all mention of fossil fuels from last year’s final text, 57 nations frustrated with the deadlock gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April for the first global summit dedicated to phasing them out, declaring the energy transition “past its point of no return.”

Soaring oil and gas prices in the wake of the war in the Middle East have added economic momentum to the shift as countries, companies and households invest in renewables to insulate themselves from volatile fossil fuel markets.

“Electrification is one of the best investments governments can make to avert the worst impacts of climate change, bolster the economy and increase resilience to external shocks,” said Dr William Lamb, a senior researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the report.

Geopolitical storm hits weather monitoring 

The scientists behind the report closed the launch presser with a warning about their own ability to keep watch, as the United States, long the backbone of the global climate observing network, pulls funding, satellites and instruments from some of the world’s most important sources of climate data.

“Just when we need to monitor the Earth system the most, the observations and the global programs that coordinate them are imperilled,” said Professor Peter Thorne of Maynooth University, deputy chair of the Global Climate Observing System. “It is imperative that countries urgently increase their support of both earth observation programs and the coordinating mechanisms that sustain them.”

The peer-reviewed paper itself states that future monitoring of its indicators, including ocean and satellite measurements of the Earth’s energy imbalance, is threatened by “geopolitical and public funding decisions.”

This month, the United States began dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368 million network of some 900 deep-sea instruments, including an array in the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland that monitors the Atlantic circulation system, whose potential collapse scientists rank among the gravest climate tipping points.

The Trump administration has also sought for two consecutive years to eliminate the research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose 2026 budget request contained the line: “Total, Climate Research: $0.” 

Congress has so far rejected the deepest cuts, but the administration’s latest proposal would strip more than $1 billion from the agency. NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory supplies the atmospheric CO2 record that underpins the report published in Bonn. 

The stakes of losing sight of the ocean may arrive quickly. A strong El Niño is building in the Pacific, Smith noted, “which could be a sign of a very warm 2027 to come.”

“These observing systems are not guaranteed. They’re threatened by lack of funding, lack of infrastructure and geopolitical instability,” Burgess said. “Without continued investment in these observing systems, we can’t continue to monitor the climate at a time when it matters more than ever.”

Image Credits: Matt Howard/ Unslash.