While global efforts to avert catastrophic climate change are still far off track a decade after the Paris Agreement was adopted, the landmark pact has spurred big strides on cutting planet-heating emissions and reducing the expected rise in global warming.
Speaking days before the start of COP30, UN Secretary-General António Guterres conceded that the global average temperature will increase by more than the 1.5C limit above pre-industrial levels agreed in the Paris deal, marking a sharp blow.
The legally binding accord set an overarching goal to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels” while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5C.
But even if the most symbolic 1.5C target is missed, the projected global temperature increase by the end of the century has fallen in the decade since the Paris deal was struck – and climate experts say the agreement is still the compass of global climate action.
To mark the agreement’s 10-year anniversary, we take a look at what it has achieved, and what remains to be done:
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What has the Paris Agreement achieved on emissions?
When the Paris deal was adopted, no countries had pledged to cut their emissions to net zero. Now, about 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions are covered by net-zero pledges.
“Countries have moved from a patchwork of targets to economy-wide, absolute emission-reduction goals, and projected 21st-century emissions under both current policies and targets have fallen markedly since 2015,” said an analysis by Climate Analytics, adding that climate policies meant global emissions could peak before 2030.
The world’s projected temperature increase by the end of the century has fallen to 2.3C-2.5C from 3C-3.7C when the deal was struck, according to the UN Environment Programme’s latest Emissions Gap Report, showing the impact of climate action.
Still, short-term action since 2015 has not been sufficient to prevent overshooting of the Paris accord’s 1.5C limit. And even if that happens temporarily and temperatures are brought back down again, it could still have disastrous consequences for ecosystems, economies and vulnerable communities.
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“This is not a failure of the Agreement’s design; it is a failure of collective ambition to match its aims,” the Climate Analytics analysis said.
The State of Climate Action 2025 report from the World Resources Institute (WRI) also found there is still a long way to go.
“Across every single sector, climate action has failed to materialise at the pace and scale required to achieve the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal,” the WRI report said.
What are the biggest hurdles for the key Paris goals?
None of the 45 indicators assessed in the WRI report were found to be on track to reach their 1.5C-aligned targets by the end of this decade, with some of the worst-performing metrics including halting permanent forest loss, phasing out coal-generated power and scaling up climate finance.
At the same time, public finance for fossil fuels continues to grow – even two years after the world agreed to transition away from coal, oil and gas, rising by an average of $75 billion per year since 2014, the WRI report said.
Elsewhere, climate experts say progress has started to slow down, warning that this could push the Paris Agreement’s goals on limiting temperature rise further out of reach.
“Progress made in decarbonising steel has largely stagnated; and the share of trips taken by passenger cars – many of which still rely on the internal combustion engine – continues to rise,” the WRI report said.
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The Climate Action Monitor 2025, issued by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, shows that the number and stringency of policies increased by only 1% in 2024.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare said that while improved national policies meant a global peak in emissions before 2030 was now in sight, a dwindling sense of urgency among decision-makers must be tackled.
“The big problem is that progress has flattened in the last few years, both in terms of targets put forward by countries and policies put in place. Ten years after Paris, COP30 will have to deal with some of this delay with urgency,” Hare said.
Ten years on, what is actually working?
Framework climate laws have more than tripled since 2015 and national climate policy tools are up seven-fold, a recent study by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found.
When it comes to the clean energy rollout, “the Paris Agreement has had a transformative global impact”, the ECIU report said.
Back in 2015, the global non-fossil share of power generation was expected to rise modestly from 32% to 38% by 2035, according to BP’s Energy Outlook. But in 2024, that figure had already reached 41%, ECIU said.
Solar and wind have grown more than 1,500% faster than forecast by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2015, and renewables have just overtaken coal as the largest source of electricity generation.
“We are already investing twice as much into renewables than fossil fuels. Now renewables meet 80% of global electricity demand growth, solar has been deployed 15 times faster than predicted 10 years ago,” said Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement and a founding partner of the Global Optimism civic organisation.
The adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is already 40% above the IEA’s 2015 projections and on track to be 66% higher by 2030.
World leaders get behind climate action at first COP in the Amazon
Despite the faster-than-expected growth in EV adoption, the WRI analysis said the sector was still off track for achieving the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C warming limit.
“The advances we’re seeing in the real economy are telling us we are walking in the right direction, even if too slowly,” said Figueres.
What’s next for the Paris Agreement?
Heightened geopolitical tensions, trade rivalries and aid cuts could spill over into the new cycle of nationally determined contributions (NDCs), or national climate plans, which are a key Paris Agreement mechanism, said Paula Castro from the Center for Energy and the Environment at Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
Under the agreement, the NDCs have to be submitted in a five-year cycle and the latest round, the third, were due by this September but around two-thirds of countries missed the UN deadline, though there has been a flurry in the run-up to COP30. Those that have been submitted are not ambitious enough to deliver global emissions cuts in line with the Paris Agreement temperature goals.
“It remains to be seen whether the system of periodic updates and improvements to NDCs endures today’s tough geopolitical climate. Unless governments urgently raise both ambition and implementation, the NDC process risks sliding into an exercise in paperwork rather than the engine of climate progress it was meant to be,” Castro said in an interview with Nature Climate Change.
In another blow for the Paris Agreement, US President Donald Trump has ordered his country’s withdrawal from the pact for the second time. His decision means the world’s largest economy will join just three countries that are party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) but not the Paris Agreement – Iran, Libya and Yemen.
The US leader’s step drew international criticism, but climate experts do not expect it to halt progress elsewhere.
“While it’s clear the speed and scale has to increase, the institutional buy-in of the Paris Agreement continues and moves forward despite two pull-outs by the US,” said Jennifer Morgan, former German state secretary and special envoy for international climate action.
She said the rising cost of climate-linked disasters should give fresh impetus to the Paris Agreement goals.
“We know just in Europe extreme weather events cost 43 billion euros per year … Not acting on climate has a huge cost to the economy, and that’s beginning to resonate with leaders,” she said.
The post Health check: 10 years of the Paris Agreement appeared first on Climate Home News.
At Climate Home News, we found this year a pretty depressing one to cover, shaped as it was by Donald Trump’s attacks on climate science and action at home and abroad – and rounded off by the UN declaring global warming will break through the key 1.5C limit the world set itself in 2015.
But it wasn’t all bad. Nobody had decided to follow the US out of the Paris Agreement by the time it turned 10 this month. Anti-climate candidates in Canada and Australia, backed by Trump, lost elections convincingly. And 2025 may also have been the year carbon dioxide emissions fell for the first time.
What’s more, our reporting this year saw results in the real world. After we revealed that Chilean doctors believe pollution from copper mines in the northern hub of Calama is causing autism, campaigners sued state-owned mining company Codelco. The case is ongoing.
One of the lawyers representing the campaigners said “when [Climate Home News] revealed our silent suffering and our fight, we felt we had finally been heard and had entered the national conversation thanks to international media coverage. That was the final push to file the lawsuit.”
If you want to fund more impactful reporting like this in 2026, please subscribe and unlock all of our content for just the price of a coffee per week. Or to keep up with our latest coverage, you can sign up for our free newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, BlueSky and Facebook.
Below are nine of our best stories this year and, if that’s not enough, here’s nine more from 2024.
1. Solar squeeze: US tariffs threaten panel production and jobs in Thailand
In the year of trade wars, Trump extended Biden-era tariffs on solar panels from China to neighbouring countries. Nicha Wachpanich spoke to some of those workers who subsequently lost their jobs making panels at Chinese-run factories in Thailand and found that the US levies and bad behaviour by bosses had combined to crush their dreams of a better life.
2. Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs
Trump being Trump, and axing US climate finance, is no reason to let other wealthy donor nations off the hook. We examined the latest spreadsheets for annual adaptation aid and found Japan is counting support for massive infrastructure projects in its figures, despite them having only a dubious role in helping people adapt to climate change.
Our reporter Tanbirul Miraj Ripon visited one such project – the Matarbari port in Bangladesh. He found that the port handles coal and gas imports and has destroyed locals’ homes and livelihoods. Despite this, on paper it represents $363 million in Japanese climate adaptation finance, the biggest single climate resilience project being funded by a wealthy country in 2023.
3. Ethiopia’s bold EV ambitions hit bumps in rural areas
Other nations are trying hard to go green but finding it tricky. This year, Ethiopia hosted the Africa Climate Summit, was selected as the host of COP32 and opened the continent’s biggest hydropower dam.
It plans to use some of this clean power to charge electric vehicles, after banning imports of cars with internal combustion engines (even as the European Union is softening its own 2035 ban on ICEs). While that will reduce Ethiopia’s already tiny emissions and its fossil fuel import bills, it won’t be easy in a nation where only half the population has electricity access, as Solomon Yimer and Vivian Chime reported.
4. Ending poverty and gangs: How Zambia seeks to cash in on the global drive for EVs
Other African governments are trying to cash in on their minerals, which big players like China, the US and increasingly Saudi Arabia want for green technologies and/or making equipment for wars.
Pamela Kapekele went to look at the situation in Zambia’s Copperbelt province – where you can probably guess what they produce! She found that good tax regulations and working conditions will be needed if locals are to see the benefits of surging demand for the metal.
Later in the year, an acid spill from a copper-mine tailings dam that contaminated the country’s main river showed the value of environmental regulation too. Reporting from Nigeria’s lithium and South Africa’s platinum mines also highlighted the challenges of making minerals mining and processing cleaner and fairer for communities.
5. Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy?
Some sectors – like international aviation and shipping – tend to fall outside the scope of national media, and it’s a gap we’ve aimed to fill. Together with Singapore’s Straits Times, we tracked the supply chain for what the airline industry calls “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF) and found that virgin and barely used palm oil – which threatens rainforests – is being passed off as waste cooking oil and used to power planes in Europe.
Malaysia is a particular hotspot for this fraud, as government subsidies there make virgin palm oil cheap in the shops – and it can be sold for a higher price as “used” cooking oil, providing a profit motive for flipping it. Our investigation was picked up by the Financial Times, Bloomberg and the Malaysian authorities, who have since launched a crackdown on this kind of fraud.
But with verification of the materials used for SAF relying on just a handful of commercial auditors conducting mainly paper-based checks, airlines currently cannot know for sure if their green jet fuel is actually sustainable. Their advertising to passengers should – but often doesn’t – reflect this uncertainty.
6. Brazil’s environment minister suggests roadmap to end fossil fuels at COP30
Our reporting was often prescient this year. We called it correctly that the US would leave the Paris Agreement but not the UNFCCC, that Argentina would not follow America out of Paris, that Ethiopia rather than Nigeria would be chosen as COP32 host and that petrostates would try to kill a new green shipping framework at the International Maritime Organization.
We are also pretty sure we were the first – at least in English – to pick up on Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva’s proposal for COP30 to agree on a roadmap away from fossil fuels, which she aired back in June at London Climate Week. That proposal was pushed by President Lula at the start of COP30, dominated much of the conversation at the summit and will continue to be discussed throughout 2026.
8. PR firm working for Shell wins COP30 media contract
In the summer of 2025, our crack investigative reporter Matteo Civillini got the scoop on how the Brazilian government, via a contract tendered by the UN, was working with Edelman on international media relations for the COP30 climate summit while the global PR giant was simultaneously engaged in promoting Shell’s fossil fuel interests in Brazil.
This story was picked up by a range of other media, and amplified calls for agencies whose clients include fossil fuel firms to be excluded from the climate negotiations. Advocacy group Clean Creatives was inspired by Matteo’s reporting to launch a campaign against Edelman’s COP involvement. That culminated in an open letter from influencers and creators with a combined audience of over 24 million calling for Edelman to be dropped. The drumbeat on this theme is likely to get louder in 2026.
8. “House of cards”: Verra used junk carbon credits to fix Shell’s offsetting scandal
And talking of smoke and mirrors, just when we thought the murky web of carbon offsetting linking oil and gas major Shell to sham rice-farming projects in China couldn’t get any more convoluted, it did exactly that.
By combing through the records of carbon-credit registry Verra – the world’s biggest – Matteo confirmed that nearly a million bogus offsets from 10 disqualified methane reduction projects had been compensated for with the same number of junk credits from another four such projects that were also axed by Verra.
“It’s frankly unbelievable that Verra considers it appropriate to compensate for hot air credits with other hot air credits,” Jonathan Crook, policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, told us. “To pretend this is a satisfactory resolution is both absurd and deeply alarming.”
Verra insists the replacement credits were technically available to plug the gap left by the first batch – even though the second set, too, now need to be swapped out. Shell is keeping its distance, saying it does not manage or operate “the projects in question” despite being earlier involved in the Chinese rice-farming programmes as their “authorised representative”. Mind-boggling indeed!
9. Self-taught mechanics give second life to Jordan’s glut of spent EV batteries
In what was on balance a bad year, we brought you some hope too. A landmark advisory opinion on climate change and human rights from the International Court of Justice in The Hague was stronger than anyone imagined and may open the door to lawsuits against polluting countries and companies in 2026.
Other good news stories included analysts suggesting China’s fossil fuel use could peak this year, the UN’s loss and damage fund launching its first call for proposals, South Korea and Morocco moving to phase out coal and a boom in imports of solar panels to Africa.
Hope came too from ordinary people and their ingenuity – like the untrained Jordanians interviewed by Yamuna Matheswaran, hooking up solar panels to old Tesla batteries, lowering both their electricity bills and their carbon emissions into the bargain.
The post Nine of our best climate stories from 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
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