Keeping the Paris Agreement temperature goal within reach requires transformational change across power, buildings, industry, transport, forests and land, and food and agriculture, as well as the immediate scale-up of technological carbon dioxide removal and climate finance. The State of Climate Action series provides an overview of the world’s collective efforts to accelerate these far-reaching transitions. We first translate each sectoral transformation into a set of actionable, 1.5°C-aligned targets for 2030, 2035 and 2050, with associated indicators and datasets. To then quantify the global gap in climate action, annual installments of the report compare recent rates of historical change with the pace of progress required to achieve 2030 targets. While a similar undertaking is warranted to evaluate adaptation efforts, we limit this series’ scope to tracking progress made in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This technical note accompanies the State of Climate Action 2025. It describes our methods for identifying sectors that must transform, translating these transformations into global mitigation targets primarily for 2030, 2035 and 2050 and selecting indicators with datasets to monitor annual change. It also outlines our approach for assessing the world’s progress made toward near-term targets and categorizing recent efforts as on track, off track, well off track, heading in the wrong direction or insufficient data. Finally, it details how we compare trends over time, as well as limitations to our methodology.

This year’s technical note features several changes to the methods paper we published in 2024. Key updates include:

  • The addition of five indicators that monitor change in fossil fuels’ share of the transport sector’s total energy consumption, as well as the GHG emissions intensity of enteric fermentation, manure management, soil fertilization and rice cultivation.
  • The removal of three indicators that tracked progress made toward increasing the number of kilometers of high-quality bike lanes per 1,000 inhabitants, electric vehicles’ share in two- and three-wheeler sales and the share of global GHG emissions under mandatory corporate climate risk disclosure.
  • The inclusion of new 2035 targets for 16 indicators, such that more than 90 percent of the 45 indicators assessed now have global, 1.5°C-aligned targets for this year.
  • Revisions to previously published 2030, 2035 and 2050 targets for 14 indicators across the industry, transport, food and agriculture and finance sectors to account for recently published literature and modelling efforts.
  • A refinement to our methodology for assessing progress across indicators for which future change may follow an S-curve trajectory, including efforts to fit two types of S-curves to indicators’ historical data.  

Published under Systems Change Lab, this technical note is a joint effort of the Bezos Earth Fund, Climate Analytics, the Climate High-Level Champions, ClimateWorks Foundation and World Resources Institute. 

Preview image by Climate State