CAT Reports Five-Year Stall in Global Climate Action

Global climate action has made effectively no net progress over five consecutive years, according to Climate Action Tracker (CAT). Its latest assessment puts warming at 2.6°C by 2100 if governments fulfil their 2030 and 2035 climate targets, leaving that conditional projection unchanged from the previous year.

The findings form part of CAT’s 2026 global temperature update, published on November 12, 2026, during COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye. CAT attributed the five-year standstill to actions that advanced climate efforts being offset by actions in the opposite direction.

For policies already in place, CAT projects a temperature increase of 2.7°C by 2100, compared with 2.6°C in its preceding update. That scenario is distinct from its calculations assuming governments deliver their pledges. CAT develops global emissions pathways using country-level assessments, then runs those pathways through the MAGICC7 reduced-complexity climate model to estimate temperature outcomes, including median warming.

Achieving all current pledges together with long-term targets would produce warming of 2.1°C by 2100 in CAT’s assessment, down from its earlier estimate of 2.2°C. A separate optimistic case assumes every target and net-zero commitment is implemented in full; CAT projects 1.9°C under those conditions.

According to CAT’s explanation of the Paris Agreement, its temperature objective combines keeping warming well below 2°C relative to preindustrial levels with efforts to restrict the increase to 1.5°C. The new update projects that long-term warming will pass 1.5°C around 2030. CAT described the remaining objective as containing the extent of that overshoot and returning below 1.5°C by 2100.

In calculating a pathway to limit the overshoot, CAT put the annual emissions reduction needed through 2030 at about 4%, with a range of 3–5%. For the first half of the 2030s, its calculation rises to about 7% annually, within a 6–9% range. From 2035 to 2050, the corresponding annual figure is about 9%, with a stated range of 6–15%.

The update also records continued growth in global emissions alongside changes in electricity supply and transport. According to CAT, clean electricity supplied the entire increase in worldwide power demand during 2025. It also stated that renewable deployment in China and India continued at record rates and that electric-vehicle uptake reached its highest levels.

* This article is based on publicly available information at the time of writing.