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, locking in warming for decades to come. Given 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 committed 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 across the Earth system.

A larger overshoot of 1.5°C increases the risk of irreversible impacts, forces greater reliance on carbon dioxide removals and narrows adaptation options. 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. A shift towards plant-rich diets is the primary demand-side lever for creating critical “option space” to meet climate and environmental goals, while improving human health. Realising these co-benefits and managing potential impacts on labour demand require cross-sectoral policies that minimise trade-offs and support a just transition.

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 carbon dioxide carries additional risk. Using more realistic, up-to-date climate models reveals a social cost of carbon (SCC) up to four times higher.

Advances in attribution science demonstrate individual emitters’ climate impacts. 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, and for loss and damage discussions.

Climate clubs can limit carbon leakage, but fairness shapes their feasibility and effectiveness. Linking climate action to trade measures can help accelerate industrial decarbonisation and limit carbon leakage. However, careful design is essential to avoid imposing disproportionate adjustment costs on developing economies in order to secure political legitimacy and environmental effectiveness.

Organised obstruction prevents effective climate policy through denial, delay, dilution, and distraction. Coordinated efforts driven by carbon-intensive industries have expanded beyond outright science denial to subtler tactics, including greenwashing, promoting 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