New Report Finds Efforts to Slow Climate Change Are Working—Just Not Fast Enough

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 Shumer, 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, Shumer 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, Shumer 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,” Shumer said.’

Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, points out that phasing out coal is also a net good for public health. Recent research estimated that pollutants from coal-fired power plants killed 460,000 Americans between 1999 and 2020.

“Coal is a killer especially in developing countries, but the health burden is immense even in countries like the US,” says Cleetus, who was not involved in the new report.

Meanwhile, the only indicator that was on track in the last installment of the report, which was published in 2023, has since taken a turn for the worse. In the last report, the share of electric vehicles in passenger car sales was a welcome silver lining; nearly one in every five new cars purchased in 2023 was an EV, a 35 percent increase from the year before. Compared to the fact that EVs were less than 1 percent of passenger car sales when the Paris Agreement was signed 10 years ago, that progress is truly impressive. But despite continuing runaway success in Chinese markets, where EVs account for almost half of all new passenger car purchases, sales in markets including the EU and the US slowed last year.

The backslide on electric vehicles surprised Laurens Speelman, who serves on the strategy team of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that works on market-based climate solutions. (Speelman has been involved in crafting past versions of this report, but was not involved in the current iteration.) Despite the progress the world has seen since Paris, Speelman says, “the message that we're still not on track is really sobering, and a stark one.”

The news isn’t all bad. Solar power is one of the big success stories of the current moment, with 33 percent more solar installed worldwide last year than in 2023. Much of that growth is, again, driven by China, which installed twice as much solar capacity in 2024 as the US has installed on the grid in total.

The report’s authors also point to private climate finance—investments from banks, businesses, and other private entities—as another promising high point. This type of investment has increased so much since the last iteration of this report that it has been upgraded from “well off track” to “off track.” Public climate finance, though—money pledged from wealthier countries to developing ones to help them adapt to climate change and cope with damages—is still “well off track,” the report finds.

There is usually a barrage of reports measuring climate progress as the world moves toward the UN climate change conference, held annually in November. With the addition of the Paris anniversary in December, there’s plenty of opportunity to take stock of where we are now. A report released last week sounded the alarm that the first climate “tipping point”—a group of ecological thresholds past which small changes can lead to cascading and catastrophic effects—has been reached, as the world’s coral reefs are in the middle of a multi-year bleaching event. The World Meteorological Organization also said last week that CO₂ levels increased by a record amount in 2024.

The US, meanwhile—which Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement for the second time in his career on his first day in office this year—seems eager to destroy as much climate progress as possible, both at home and abroad. In a scattered September speech to the UN General Assembly, the president called climate change a “con job,” attacking scientific predictions as “made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.”

The Trump administration is currently launching a full-scale attack on EVs, removing tax credits for buyers, and freezing funding allocated for building new charging stations. It’s also attacking all forms of renewable energy; while it seems to reserve special animus for offshore wind, it’s also pulling tax credits for clean energy buildouts while simultaneously boosting coal. The US does remain in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the treaty that provides the basis of the Paris Agreement—for now.

Speelman, who is based in Amsterdam, says he has no idea the impact a second Trump administration will have on this year’s negotiations, which are taking place in Brazil. But he points to the massive international adoption of renewable energy, as laid out in the report, as a point of hope.

“There’s a factor at play which is very different from a few years ago, which is that the economics are really behind a lot of different clean technologies,” he says. “It's simply good business to invest in renewable technologies, electrified grids, and electrification technologies and in energy efficiency.”

Cleetus sees what’s happening in the US as part of a larger, more troubling pattern.

“Fossil fuel entities and their political allies continue to hold sway over countries’ energy policies and are showing up at the international climate talks in ever larger numbers to directly interfere with the outcomes,” she says. “What’s happening in the US is an especially acute and alarming example where the government is explicitly pushing a fossil fuel agenda, right down to spreading lies and disinformation about climate science.”