U.N. Report on Climate Goals Says Countries Have Made No Progress

One year after world leaders made a landmark promise to move away from fossil fuels, countries have essentially made no progress in cutting emissions and tackling global warming, according to a United Nations report issued on Thursday.

Global greenhouse gas emissions soared to a record 57 gigatons last year and are not on track to decline much, if at all, this decade, the report found. Collectively, nations have been so slow to curtail their use of oil, gas and coal that it now looks unlikely that countries will be able to limit global warming to the levels they agreed to under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“Another year passed without action means we’re worse off,” said Anne Olhoff, a climate policy expert based in Denmark and a co-author of the assessment, known as the Emissions Gap Report.

The report comes a month before diplomats from around the world are scheduled to meet in Baku, Azerbaijan, for annual United Nations climate talks, where countries will discuss how they might step up efforts to address global warming.

Lately, those efforts have faced huge obstacles.

Even though renewable energy sources like wind and solar are growing rapidly around the world, demand for electricity has been rising even faster, which means countries are still burning more fossil fuels each year. Geopolitical conflicts, from the U.S.-China rivalry to war in places like Ukraine and Gaza, have made international cooperation on climate change harder. And rich countries have failed to keep their financial promises to help poor countries shift away from oil, gas and coal.

At last year’s climate talks in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, representatives from nearly every nation approved a pact that called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels” and accelerating climate action this decade. But the agreement was vague on how to do so and on which countries should do what, and so far there has been little follow-through.