Humanity is not on track to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C by 2030, according to the State of Climate Action 2025 report published on 22 October. The study, released ahead of the UN COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil (10–21 November 2025), paints a sobering picture: progress is lagging across all 45 key climate indicators, with 29 showing significant shortfalls and 5 moving in the wrong direction.
Instead of declining, emissions from steel production, food waste, and fossil fuel subsidies continue to rise, while deforestation and private car use expand. To stay on the 1.5°C trajectory, the report outlines a series of drastic measures, including:
- Phasing out coal 10 times faster, shutting down 360 coal power plants per year and halting all new projects.
- Reducing deforestation nine times faster, as the planet is currently losing the equivalent of 22 football fields of forest every minute.
- Expanding high-speed public transport networks five times faster, adding at least 1,400 km of new metro, light rail, and bus lines annually.
- Cutting consumption of beef, lamb, and goat meat five times faster in high-intake regions, equivalent to two fewer portions per week for residents of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.
- Scaling up carbon capture projects tenfold, deploying nine large facilities per year.
- Increasing climate finance by $1 trillion annually, roughly two-thirds of what governments currently spend subsidizing fossil fuels.
Experts argue that such ambitions may be out of reach. Many energy and climate analysts question whether these measures are technically and economically feasible within the next five years — or whether they reflect more of a political aspiration than a realistic action plan.
So the question remains: Can humanity truly accelerate climate action at the speed the science demands, or are these goals already beyond our collective grasp?
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