A UN tally of 154 countries’ climate plans now projects a 6% cut on 2019 levels by 2035, half last year’s estimate. Greenhouse gas concentrations hit new records in 2025.
National climate plans put 2035 global emissions about 6% below 2019 levels, a UN synthesis report published on 27 October found. It covers 127 new plans from 154 countries, which together produced about 71% of global emissions in 2019. Some climate pledges are conditional on finance or other outside support. Delivering those too would lift the cut to about 9%.
Last November, the UN climate secretariat put the figure at 12%, based on plans from 113 countries. To hold warming to 1.5C, emissions need to fall about 60% over the same period. On those figures, the shortfall against the 1.5C pathway has grown from 48 to 54 percentage points in a year.
A US pledge drops out of the count
Climate Home News, which examined the change, traced the fall to two causes. The US left the Paris Agreement in January 2026. As a result, its Biden-era pledge to cut emissions 61% to 66% on 2005 levels by 2035 no longer counts. The UN now projects US emissions from current policy instead. Meanwhile, about 40 plans filed since last November proved weaker than the UN’s modelling had assumed.
Records in the atmosphere
Also on 27 October, the World Meteorological Organization’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin put 2025 levels of carbon dioxide at 426.8 parts per million. That is 153% of the pre-industrial level. Methane and nitrous oxide also reached records.
Carbon dioxide rose 2.8 parts per million in the year. The rise was smaller than during the 2023 to 2024 El Niño, because land carbon sinks recovered and fires fell. Oksana Tarasova, a WMO senior scientific officer, said the rise “is still a substantial addition of carbon to the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning.”
Fossil fuel emissions are set to fall in 2026, largely because of the Hormuz crisis. Any year of net emissions still adds to the stock in the air, so concentrations would keep rising.
Washington moves to loosen its methane rule
On the same day, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed revisions to its 2024 methane standards for oil and gas. The plan would scrap the Super Emitter Program, which uses third-party monitoring to flag large leaks. It would also ease rules for low-output wells and relax flaring requirements.
The EPA puts the saving for consumers and businesses at $45bn and expects an extra 210 million barrels of oil. Under the Biden administration, officials projected that the 2024 rule would prevent about 52.6 million tonnes of methane by 2038. The EPA’s release doesn’t estimate how much more methane the changes would allow.
What Antalya will test
COP31 opens in Antalya, Turkey, on 9 November. Simon Stiell, executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said “collective progress remains clearly insufficient”. Many countries, he added, face “substantial barriers to delivering their targets and pledges.” He also listed curbing methane emissions among “important steps”.
The UN’s Standing Committee on Finance found that climate finance rose 32% to $1.9tn a year in 2023 and 2024. The conditional pledges that would lift the cut to 9% depend partly on that money reaching the countries that made them. Even at 9%, the cut would be less than a sixth of what 1.5C requires.
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