The World Is Still Disastrously Off Track on Climate Change

As world leaders gather in Brazil this year for Cop30 – the first Amazonian Cop – its worth doing a quick reality check on how we are collectively tracking to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite 30 years of UN climate summits, about half of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere as the Industrial Revolution has been emitted since 1990. Incidentally, 1990 was the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the global authority on climate change science – released its First Assessment Report confirming the threat of human-caused global warming. As scientists all over the world prepare the IPCC’s Seventh assessment Report, we do so knowing that our work is still being overshadowed by politics. Despite all the well-intentioned half-measures, the truth is that the world is still disastrously off track to limit dangerous climate change.

In the avalanche of technical reports released before Cop30, the World Meteorological Association stated that CO₂ concentrations reached a record high of 423.9 parts per million in 2024, with the growth rate from 2023 to 2024 surging by the largest yearly increase since modern measurements began in 1957. The latest figures from Global Carbon Project show that 90% of total global CO₂ emissions in 2024 were generated from the burning of fossil fuels, with the remaining 10% coming from land-use changes including deforestation adn wildfires.

While the growth in fossil CO₂ emissions in 2024 was driven by increases in gas and oil – together accounting for just over half of global emissions – the burning of coal reached a record high, accounting for 41%. Despite Cop28’s global stocktake calling on all nations to contribute to “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, collectively there are still plans to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5C, with the continued extraction of gas rationalised as a lower emission intensity “transition fuel”.

Instead of focusing on economic incentives to encourage the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, climate policies are heavily reliant on feelgood “nature positive” solutions that aim to neutralise carbon emissions by essentially planting trees instead of reducing industrial emissions. While the protection, expansion and rehabilitation of natural carbon sinks like forests and wetlands is an inherently good thing to do, researchers have shown that there is not enough land to meet the global goal of net zero emissions using nature-based solutions alone.