5 years of fighting climate change haven't done much and stronger targets are needed, report says

ANTALYA, Turkey (AP) — The world has failed to slow or stop global warming trends in the past five years because plans weren’t realized and efforts that would have helped were canceled out, a report said Thursday.

The grim assessment came during a U.N. climate meeting in Antalya, Turkey, where more government leaders were due to speak Thursday about the state of a warming world and what they hope to do about it.

“Aggregated climate action has now essentially stalled for five consecutive years with positive and negative actions canceling each other out,” the independent Climate Action Tracker said in its report. The first five years after the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world did so much that it trimmed an entire degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) from warming projections, but nothing has changed since, the report said.

Climate change is caused mainly by the release of greenhouse gases, which happens when fuels like gas, oil and coal are burned. Confronting climate change means finding ways to drastically cut the amount of emissions put into the atmosphere each year. Countries establish plans to reduce emissions, called nationally determined contributions. The speed of reductions and ways to achieve them are different by country.

Because collective efforts of countries haven't significantly reduced global emissions, the world is now “headed toward an irrecoverable overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius” (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures, which is the warming threshold the world adopted during the Paris Agreement, according to the report.

The report said if the nations of the world fulfill all their climate promises — which is a big if — the globe will end the century 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial times. That's the same pace the globe was on in 2024 and 2025, showing the new set of promises made last year have “failed to the move the needle” of projected warming, said report lead author Sarah Heck, a climate policy analyst at Climate Analytics.

“This is still not enough,” Heck said. "Countries really do need to strengthen their targets.”

That's the message island leaders gave the rest of the world Wednesday . Even more leaders of island nations were expected Thursday to reinforce what to their people is a life-or-death message. While all the globe is threatened by climate change's souped-up storms, hotter heat waves, worsening droughts and floods, island nations also have to watch rising seas shrink swallow up their land.

“Every new oil well drilled, every piece of coal extracted is a threat to my country’s future. The discovery of new fossil fuel resources is not something to celebrate, but something to fear,” Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine said Wednesday as her colleagues from Tuvalu, Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, Niue and other islands are expected to make similar pleas Thursday. “No one has the right to pollute their neighbors.”

“It is time to wake up,” said Heine, who recalled coral that she watched go from “bright and lush” to white with bleaching this year . She said the response of the world to the inevitability of passing the 1.5 warming limit target “must be overwhelming or the world we know is over.”

To fight climate changes, the rich world needs to not just promise more, but also deliver more money to poor nations to help them recover from climate damage and adapt to a warmer world, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said Wednesday.

“Pledges are not payments. But even the promised pledges are now 70% below previous levels,” Mottley told her fellow leaders. “So the applause in this room, let us be clear, has never rebuilt a single home in any country.”

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