UN Climate Report Reveals Progress—But Warns Major Acceleration Still Needed

Released ahead of COP30 in Brazil next month, the report covers national climate plans formally submitted in the NDC registry between January 1, 2024 and September 30, 2025, Xinhua news agency reported.

The report provides new indications of real and increasing progress on action to address climate change through national efforts underpinned by global cooperation based on the 64 new NDCs submitted by 64 parties to the Paris Agreement, covering about 30 per cent of total global emissions in 2019.

In their NDCs, parties are setting out new national climate targets and plans to achieve them that differ in pace and scale from those that have come before, the report said.

It said that parties are bending their combined emission curve further downward, but still not quickly enough.

The whole-of-economy, whole-of-society approaches evident in NDCs point to strong climate action as an increasingly core pillar of ensuring economic stability and growth, jobs, health, and energy security and affordability, among many other policy imperatives, in countries, it said.

"However, it remains clear that major acceleration is still needed in terms of delivering faster and deeper emission reductions and ensuring that the vast benefits of strong climate action reach all countries and peoples," the report said.

To provide a wider picture of global progress ahead of COP30, UNFCCC has done some additional calculations which also capture new NDCs or targets submitted or announced up to the publication of the report, Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told a daily briefing.

"They say that this wider picture, shows global emissions clearly falling for the first time, by around 10 percent by 2035. The report underscores that while clear progress is evident, major acceleration is needed to deliver faster and deeper emission cuts, to keep the 1.5 (degrees Celsius) limit within reach," he said.

"Both the Secretary-General and the UNFCCC have noted that the science is very clear: it is entirely possible and essential to bring temperatures back down to 1.5 degrees, after temporary overshoot of that limit," said Dujarric.

- IANS