It’s climate reporting season in the run up to this year’s UNFCCC COP meeting in Turkey. Three UN Environment Programme reports, the annual State of the Cryosphere report from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative and the more scientific State of the Climate report have all been published in the last few weeks. They paint a picture of a steadily worsening situation, but this year, a central message is that staying below the 1.5ºC Paris goal is no longer possible.

The 2026 State of the Climate Report by William Ripple et al. opens with the following statement: “We are witnessing the rapid destabilisation of the Earth’s climate system. This is no longer a warning for the future; it is a diagnosis of the present.”

Their report charts 16 key planetary vital signs and concludes that climate change is increasingly interacting with global biodiversity loss, freshwater stress, food insecurity, pathogens, and geopolitical instability, amplifying risks across inter- connected human and natural systems. Yet, the gap between scientific understanding and societal response continues to widen despite mounting evidence of escalating risks.

The 16 planetary vital signs in the state of the climate report, 7 of which set new records and many show acceleration. Image from William Ripple et al.

The evidence for accelerating climate and ecological disruption is now so compelling that attention must shift toward rapid decarbonisation as well as adaptation, resilience, scalable responses, and transformative systemic change.

This is echoed by two of the UNEP reports, the Emissions Gap Report 2026 and Limiting Overshoot. Both set out a strategy to limit the peak temperature and the duration of the overshoot period through a highest possible ambition pathway.

This involves reducing all human emissions by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040, all relative to 2025 levels (think Covid lockdown levels of reduction, cumulatively, for 25 years). This should lead the way towards effective (>95%) phaseout of coal in the 2040s, gas in the 2050s and oil in the 2060s. It also requires halting and reversing deforestation, cutting emissions of methane as well as other short-lived forcers and scaling up sustainably deployed carbon dioxide removal (CDR) for fast temperature decline once net zero emissions have been reached.

The chances of achieving anything like those levels of emissions cuts globally are sadly, vanishingly small. With the rate of warming now approaching 0.4ºC per decade, and the Earth’s Energy Imbalance steady increasing, staying below 2ºC of warming will likely become impossible by the early 2030s. 

This has important implications for the world’s ice, as the ICCI State of the Cryosphere, and the UNEP ICCI co-produced Overshoot and the Cryosphere reports explain. They describe three scenarios for five regions of the world’s ice; the great ice sheets and their role in sea-level rise, mountain glaciers and snow, the polar oceans, sea ice and Permafrost. The three scenarios are a current trajectory with an overshoot of 3ºC, staying below 1.5ºC, although this is now impossible, and the highest possible ambition scenario descried above, which limits the peak temperature to 1.8ºC.

All five of the Earth’s ice regions are in trouble, even if the high ambition scenario is played out, but the implications of a 3ºC world are significantly worse: 

• Ice sheet stability is threatened to the extent that 1m of sea-level rise could hit the world’s coastlines by 2070. 

• All of the world’s mid-latitude glaciers below 6,000m elevation would disappear creating water security problems for hundreds of millions of people as well as putting them at severe risk of floods and land collapses, as tragically demonstrated in Nepal. 

• The polar oceans would acidify to an extent that would threaten the food chain, including important fisheries. The AMOC and other globally important ocean circulation systems would be at risk. 

• Sea ice extent would decrease significantly leading to ice free Arctic summers, allowing the ocean to absorb much more solar energy, driving accelerated warming even faster. 

• Permafrost melt would not only seriously undermine infrastructure, but would start to emit greenhouse gases at the same rate that the US does today, seriously undermining future net zero ambitions.

Beyond the gradual climatic change we have experienced so far, growing evidence suggests that the climate system may be entering a period of increasing instability, characterised by accelerating warming, cascading feedbacks, tipping elements, and rising risks of irreversible change. Increasing energy imbalance, rising ocean heat content, weakening carbon sinks, and accelerating ice loss all point toward a climate system accumulating heat and stress at rates that are exceeding earlier expectations.

Transformative change is essential to stabilise the climate system and reduce the risk of crossing dangerous Earth system thresholds. 

These are the reports that delegates attending the COP event in Turkey will be shown. Whether they act and negotiate in a proportional manner, remains to be seen.