The world is stalling on climate change progress, with none of the 45 indicators of climate action on track for 2030, the State of Climate Action 2025 report has found.
The report translates the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit into targets for 2030, 2035, and 2050, and tracks global progress toward them across the sectors responsible for most emissions – power, buildings, industry, transport, forests and land, and food and agriculture.
Of the 45 indicators assessed:
- Six are ‘off track’, moving in the right direction but not quite fast enough.
- Twenty-nine are ‘well off track’, moving in the right direction but far too slowly.
- Five are headed in the wrong direction entirely, demanding an urgent course correction.
- Five lack sufficient data to assess progress.
“All systems are flashing red,” said Clea Schumer, Research Associate at WRI and co-lead author of the report.
“A decade of delay has dangerously narrowed the path to 1.5°C. Steady progress isn’t enough anymore – every year we fail to speed up, the gap widens and the climb gets steeper. There’s simply no time left for hesitation or half measures.”
Progress on some of the world’s most consequential indicators has not changed across consecutive reports. For example, public finance for fossil fuels has increased by an average of $75 billion per year since 2014, reaching more than $1.5 trillion in 2023.
While deforestation, which had declined earlier in the decade, is once again rising, and coal as a share of electricity generation has fallen only slightly in recent years, as it has been unable to keep pace with record-high electricity demand.
To achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C, Systems Change Lab, which publishes the report, says that by 2030, the world must phase out coal more than ten times faster, scale technological carbon removal more than ten times faster, and increase climate finance by nearly $1 trillion annually.
Sophie Boehm, Senior Research Associate at World Resources Institute and co-lead author of the report, said: “We’re not just falling behind – we’re effectively flunking the most critical subjects.”
“As this global report card shows, we have barely moved the needle on phasing out coal or halting deforestation, while public finance still props up fossil fuels. These actions aren’t optional; they’re the bare minimum needed to combat the climate crisis and protect humanity.”