Ocean heat content keeps climbing as Earth’s energy imbalance grows. The ocean continues to absorb massive amounts of excess heat, in step with Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI), locking in warming for decades to come. Because of this lag, deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are urgently needed to prevent further long-term heat accumulation.

Sea level rise in a warming world: acceleration, ice mass loss, and long-term commitment. Ice mass loss and thermal expansion are driving sea level rise. Even without further warming, irreversible change is already locked in, making adaptation essential. The prospect of these locked-in changes underlines the urgency of near-term mitigation.

Water gaps widen as continental drying accelerates. Climate change and growing water use are causing the rapid loss of freshwater across continents, threatening water security, ecosystems, and food production. The consequences of inaction extend from threats to local livelihoods to cascading impacts for planetary systems.

A larger overshoot of 1.5°C increases the risk of irreversible impacts, forces greater reliance on CO₂ removal, and narrows adaptation option. Reversing surface warming cannot undo century-scale changes in slow-responding systems like oceans, glaciers, ice sheets, and permafrost. As we approach overshoot, mitigation must expand beyond net zero towards net-negative targets and adaptation planning must prepare for peak warming conditions

Bundled interventions for food-system transformation can deliver major gains for human health and planetary stability. Shifting towards plant-rich diets is the primary demand-side lever, creating a critical “option space” for meeting climate and environmental goals. Delivering these co-benefits while ensuring a just transition, particularly as agricultural labour demands shift, requires bundling cross-sector interventions to minimise trade-offs.

The social cost of carbon has been severely underestimated. The economic damages caused by carbon emissions are substantially higher than previously estimated, and every extra tonne of CO₂ carries additional risk. Using more realistic, up-to-date climate models can increase the social cost of carbon (SCC) by up to four times. As understanding of the SCC continues to grow, so should the ambition and urgency of decarbonisation.

Advances in attribution science demonstrate individual emitters’ climate impact. Scientific advances now enable tracing the full causal chain from emissions to impact, enough to link a specific harm to a specific actor’s emissions. This strengthens the evidence available for accountability, litigation, loss, and damage.

Climate clubs can limit carbon leakage, but fairness shapes their feasibility and effectiveness. Linking climate action to trade measures can encourage decarbonisation, but the same measures may also impose disproportionate costs and challenges on developing economies, risking unintended consequences across trade, emissions, and development. To gain global approval, climate clubs must be fair.

Organised obstruction prevents effective climate policy through denial, delay, dilution and distraction. Intentional efforts to delay climate action have evolved from science denial towards subtler tactics, including greenwashing, misleading solutions, and spreading digital disinformation at scale.

Just energy transition threatened by geopolitical risks and fragmentation. Geopolitical instability can accelerate the clean-energy transition in some countries, while deepening fossil fuel reliance in others, increasing the risk of an unequal global transition