Ten years on from the Paris Agreement: national plans point to a 12 percent fall in emissions by 2035
An analysis published in Nature Climate Change shows that, on the basis of 86 national climate plans submitted so far, global emissions in 2035 should be around 12 percent lower than in 2019, a long way short of what is needed to halt warming at 1.5 degrees.
A study published in Nature Climate Change in May 2026 shows that, if all nationally determined contributions (NDCs) submitted by November 2025 by 113 parties to the Paris Agreement are implemented, global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2035 would be around 12 percent below the 2019 level. The analysis was led by a team from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, with explicit reference to 86 contributions submitted between January 2024 and November 2025, the upgraded round of national climate plans that followed the first global stocktake in 2023. The study is part of a series of assessments marking the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015.
The 12 percent drop, while a positive signal, is a long way short of what, according to the fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is needed to keep the temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius. According to the IPCC’s 2023 Summary for Policymakers, a pathway compatible with 1.5 degrees implies a 43 percent fall in emissions by 2030 compared with 2019. The current national plans, according to the authors, “substantially reduce the probability of extreme warming of more than 3 degrees, but do not remove the probability of crossing the 1.5-degree threshold within the next decade”. In other words, the agreement is working as a mechanism, but the pace and scale of ambition remain below what the physical system requires.
Methodologically, the authors calculated emissions projections for 2025, 2030 and 2035 for each national plan using a standardised framework of “conditional” and “unconditional” contributions, in order to distinguish plans that countries commit to delivering unilaterally from those that depend on international financial support. The calculation covers 113 parties responsible together for about 70 percent of global emissions. The remainder (the other 30 percent, including a handful of developing countries that have not yet submitted an updated plan) has been estimated using Climate Action Tracker (CAT) and the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI).
What progress means in practice
The practical implications of these projections are most visible in the energy sector. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), renewables grew by 15 percent in 2025 and accounted for more than 90 percent of newly built electricity-generation capacity, while investment in clean energy passed 2 trillion dollars, twice the level of investment in fossil fuels. While the pace of the transition does not yet match a 1.5-degree pathway, the authors stress that, without the Paris Agreement, global emissions by 2035 could be 20 to 48 percent higher than in 2019, underlining that the framework, for all the criticism, has produced a measurable deviation from the worst-case curve.
The biggest shock to the agreement itself in 2026 was the decision of the United States, in force from 27 January, to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the United States accounts for about 11 percent of global emissions in 2024, the second-largest national source after China. Although the US state of California, as well as regional climate initiatives such as “America Is All In”, continue to work in parallel on cutting emissions, the withdrawal of federal funding and regulation leaves measurable room for slowdown, The Washington Post wrote in its summary of the Nature Climate Change study.
The limits of this analysis are worth bearing in mind. The study measures only what is written down in national plans, not what actually happens. The gap between planned and delivered emissions (the so-called “implementation gap”) is measurable in several countries that have submitted ambitious plans but lack the regulatory capacity to deliver them. Second, the correlation between rising clean-energy investment and falling emissions is not linear, because in many regions clean energy first meets growing demand and only then displaces fossil fuels. Finally, projections to 2035 do not take into account the potential effects of climate tipping points, which the IPCC mentions as sources of uncertainty but does not quantify in its central scenarios.
