The remaining carbon budget to maintain global temperatures below the Paris agreement will be exhausted in a little more than three years at current levels of emissions.

According to the latest Indicators of Global Climate Change study published today in the journal Earth System Science Data, the amount left in the carbon budget has shrunk to an estimated 130 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, and the budget for 1.6C or 1.7C could be exceeded within nine years. This is a third update to key indicators of the state of the climate system set out in the IPCC AR6 assessment, building on previous editions in 2023 and 2024.

Professor Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds and lead author of the study, said: “Our third annual edition of Indicators of Global Climate Change shows that both warming levels and rates of warming are unprecedented. Continued record-high emissions of greenhouse gases mean more of us are experiencing unsafe levels of climate impacts. Temperatures have risen year-on-year since the last IPCC report in 2021, highlighting how climate policies and pace of climate action are not keeping up with what’s needed to address the ever-growing impacts.”

This year’s update of key climate system indicators carried out by a team of over 60 international scientists included two additional indicators, sea-level rise and global land precipitation.

Key points of the study include that human-caused warming has increased at a rate of around 0.27C/decade (2015-2024) and the most recent decade (2015-2024) was 0.31C warmer than the previous decade (2005-2014). These changes, although amplified somewhat by the exceptionally warm years in 2023 and 2024, are broadly consistent with warming rates over the last few decades.

Emissions of greenhouse gases are principally from the burning of fossil fuels, but also related to deforestation, and remain at a persistent high.

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