In the 10 years since the signing of the Paris Agreement, the backbone of international climate action, humanity has made impressive progress. Renewable energy is increasingly cheap and reliable, while electric vehicles are becoming better every year.
By virtually every key metric used to measure progress, though, we are still lagging behind where we would need to be to avert the worst effects of climate change, according to a report released Wednesday by a coalition of climate groups—and we’re running out of time to right the ship.
“All systems are flashing red,” Clea Schumer, a researcher at the World Resources Institute, one of the organizations involved in the report, said last week on a call with reporters. “There’s no doubt we are largely doing the right things—we are just not moving fast enough.”
The Paris Agreement aims to keep the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of this century. To measure progress toward this goal, the report looks at emissions from 45 different sectors of the global economy and environment, measuring everything from building electrification to use of coal in the power sector to global meat consumption.
Grimly, none of the indicators the report measures are where they need to be to keep the world on track to meet the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. Six of the 45 indicators are “off track”—progress is being made, but not fast enough—while almost 30 are “well off track,” meaning progress is much too slow. Five, meanwhile, are headed in the “wrong direction,” meaning the situation is getting worse, not better, and needs an urgent U-turn. (There’s not enough data, the report says, to measure the remaining five indicators, which include peatland degradation and restoration, food waste, and the share of new buildings that are zero-carbon.)
One of the most consistently off-track markers, experts said, was the global effort to phase out coal, one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions. While coal’s share in global electricity generation did go down slightly in 2024, total coal use actually hit a record high last year thanks to growing electricity demand, especially from China and India. A dirty power grid, Schumer said, has “huge knock-on effects” for other progress indicators like decarbonizing buildings and transportation.
To get on track, the world needs to increase its pace of coal phaseout tenfold, Schumer said. That, she continued, would entail shutting down more than 360 medium-sized coal plants each year and canceling every coal-fired power plant currently in the global development pipeline.
“We simply will not limit warming to 1.5 degrees if coal use keeps breaking records,” Schumer said.’
