The UNFCCC Process: Historic, But Not Enough?

Is the Paris Agreement enough to get us to where we need to be? Each year, the United Nations issues what is called the Emissions Gap Report. This report gives a detailed look at the delta between where our emissions are, where they'd be heading with no policy intervention, and where we expect them to be with successful implementation of existing measures. Below we see what the report tells us.

This graph shows the emissions curves for where business as usual takes us, where fully executed commitments of the Paris Agreement take us, and where we need to actually be to contain warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels. The takeaway here is that even with the ambitious Paris Agreement that we aren't sure we can meet, we still are far off from containing warming to that 1.5-2 range.

Credit: United Nations Environment Programme (2025). Emissions Gap Report 2025.

We know that we want to keep warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (relative to pre-industrial temperatures), but we have already “used up” about a degree of that. We also know that the closer to 1.5 degrees we can contain that warming, the better off we should be in terms of minimizing detrimental impacts.

  • unconditional NDC (nationally determined contributions) - these are the voluntary actions that countries have committed to that are totally implementable without external support
  • conditional NDC (nationally determined contributions) - these go farther than the unconditional NDCs, but require some sort of external financial support (perhaps from the 'high ambition' bloc of countries) or are contingent on the climate-related policies other countries choose to implement.

Take note - this is just through 2035.  As we go farther out to 2050 and 2100, what happens is that the delta gets bigger. The longer we wait to take action, the more aggressive the action would need to be to achieve ever increasingly steep reductions.