Efforts to slow climate change are working – just not fast enough, new report shows
at 10 In the years since the signing of the Paris Agreement, the backbone of international climate action, humanity has made significant progress. Renewable energies are increasingly cheap and reliable, while electric vehicles are getting better every year.
Yet by nearly every key metric used to measure progress, we’re still behind where we need to be to avoid the worst impacts of climate change — and time is running out to right the ship, according to a report released Wednesday by a coalition of climate groups.
“All systems are flashing red,” Clea Schumer, a researcher at the World Resources Institute, one of the organizations involved in the report, told reporters last week. “There’s no doubt we’re doing a lot of the right things, we’re just not moving fast enough.”
The Paris Agreement aims to keep the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. To measure progress toward this goal, the report looks at greenhouse gas emissions from 45 different sectors of the global economy and environment, measuring everything from building electrification to coal use in the electricity sector to global meat consumption.
Unfortunately, none of the indicators the report measures are anywhere near enough to keep the world on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Six of the 45 indicators are “off track” – progress is being made, but not fast enough – while almost 30 indicators are “off track”, meaning progress is too slow. Meanwhile, the five are moving in the “wrong direction,” meaning the situation is getting worse, not better, and requires an immediate turnaround. (The report says there is insufficient data to measure the remaining five indicators, which include pistachio land degradation and reclamation, food waste, and the share of zero-carbon new buildings.)
One of the most consistent signs of being off track, experts said, was the global effort to phase out coal, one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. While coal’s share of global electricity generation fell slightly in 2024, total coal consumption actually hit a record high last year thanks to growth in electricity demand, particularly from China and India. According to Schumer, a dirty power grid has “huge knock-on effects” for other indicators of progress, such as decarbonizing buildings and transportation.
To get on track, Schumer said, the world would have to speed up its coal phase-out tenfold. He continued that this would require the shutdown of more than 360 medium-sized coal-fired power plants each year and the cancellation of every coal-fired power plant currently in the global development pipeline.
“If coal use continues to break records, we will not limit warming to 1.5 degrees,” Schumer said.
