On January 27, 2026 the United States — the world’s second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter — formally left the Paris Agreement.
President Donald Trump had signed an executive order to withdraw on his inauguration day a year earlier and has since signaled plans to pull the US out of other international environmental accords.
The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015 by nearly 200 countries, established a global framework to keep warming well below 2 °C while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C. Scientists regard 1.5 °C as a crucial threshold to avoid the most severe, irreversible impacts of climate change. The United Nations now warns that temporarily exceeding that limit is likely, with potentially devastating consequences.
Despite progress in some areas, experts say the world remains at a precarious moment. Continued combustion of oil, gas and coal is driving temperatures higher and making storms, floods and heatwaves more intense. The past decade has been the warmest on record, with 2024 the hottest year to date.
At COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in 2025 scientists stressed that every fraction of a degree matters for people’s safety and wellbeing. Rising heat is estimated to be causing about one extra death every minute, while air pollution from fossil fuels is linked to roughly 2.5 million deaths annually. The economic impact is significant too: research published in The Lancet put global losses at up to $304 billion in 2024.
Ecosystems are already under severe strain. In 2024 the world experienced massive coral die-offs driven by warmer oceans; reefs sustain a quarter of marine species and underpin livelihoods in many coastal communities. Scientists warn other planetary “tipping points” — including potential dieback of parts of the Amazon and disruption of major ocean currents — are alarmingly close.
Emissions trends since Paris
The decade since the Paris deal has seen global fossil-fuel use persist and, in recent years, accelerate. Greenhouse-gas emissions hit a record 53.2 gigatons of CO2-equivalent in 2024, about 65% above 1990 levels. An assessment by Climate Analytics found no sign of a sustained global emissions slowdown.
About two-thirds of emissions come from eight economies: China, the United States, the European Union, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil and Japan. Of those, only the EU and Japan reduced emissions in 2024 compared with 2023. The energy sector remains the dominant source of greenhouse gases.
What has been achieved
There have been notable advances. Renewable energy deployment has exceeded expectations as costs fell and investment in clean technologies grew, now outstripping investment in fossil fuels. The share of global energy supplied by renewables has more than tripled since 2015.
In 2024 renewables generated 40% of global electricity. In the first half of that year, solar and wind met all net electricity demand growth and overtook coal for the first time. Global solar capacity far exceeded 2015 forecasts, and wind capacity has roughly tripled since then.
Even in the US — where the federal government under the Trump administration rolled back some renewable-support policies — clean energy expanded. Between January and September 2025, renewables plus battery storage made up 93% of newly added US grid capacity.
China led the solar surge, installing more new solar in 2024 than the rest of the world combined. Electric vehicles have also surged, rising from roughly 1% of global passenger-car sales in 2015 to nearly a quarter by 2024, putting the world on track for 100 million EVs on the road by 2030 ahead of earlier schedules.
But progress has important caveats: global coal use reached record levels last year and public finance for fossil fuels climbed to about $1.6 trillion per year.
Can the Paris goals still be met?
Experts say current policies and pledges fall well short of what is required. Without the Paris Agreement at all, models suggest end-of-century warming could have reached around 4 °C. Under current national pledges, if countries fully implement them, warming is projected at roughly 2.3–2.5 °C — a substantial improvement over no deal but still far above 1.5 °C and associated with far greater heat, storms and sea-level rise.
Ahead of the Belém summit many countries were still updating their commitments; more than 65 nations had not submitted new pledges. A UN analysis estimated that current national commitments would reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions by about 12% by 2035 relative to 2019 — insufficient to keep warming below 2 °C.
Meeting the Paris objectives now requires a dramatic ramp-up in action: phasing out coal about ten times faster this decade, increasing efforts to halt deforestation roughly nine-fold, doubling the pace of renewable deployment, raising global climate finance by nearly $1 trillion per year, and rapidly scaling public transport in the world’s most polluting cities.
Additional reporting by Katharina Schantz.
Edited by Tamsin Walker.
This story was first published on 12 November 2025 and updated on 27 January 2026 to note that the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has taken effect.