To mark ten years of the Emissions Gap Report, and inform the Climate Action Summit, UNEP released Lessons from a decade of emissions gap assessments. The report finds that the last ten years have, in some ways, been a lost decade of climate action. Greenhouse gas emissions have only grown, and faster and deeper cuts are now urgently needed. Climate ambition needs to rise at least fivefold to meet the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement. However, it also finds that the last decade has seen huge advances in political and societal support for climate action, and technological and economic options to take this action.

The world may be currently be heading for a temperature rise of over 3°C, it says, but there have never more opportunities for nations to increase action to the levels needed to ward off the worst impacts of climate change.