Carbon Tracker Initiative

How to build the integrated plan we never had

The UN officially noted in September 2026 that “exceedance of the 1.5°C global warming target is unavoidable” and we are now in era of overshoot and managing its consequences.

In some ways this was inevitable, as we had no detailed plan to achieve the target.

But we’ve started at the end of this part of the story.

So let’s back up ten years to COP 21 in Paris 2015, where the warming target was agreed amongst almost all the countries in the world.

Now, any serious multi-billion-dollar project normally has an objective, design, costs and schedules and controls. Even a house extension has these basics in place before a brick is laid, or money spent.

So Paris gave us the objective. But the rest could not yet be specified – no formal “design”, no working overall cost and schedule toward the objective, and little in the way of formal project controls.

But ten years of execution have now produced enough evidence to construct a working integrated plan, even if the original 1.5°C stretch pathway without material overshoot has been lost

By a baseline I mean the current working project plan against which actual progress is measured: the objective, design, major milestones, cost estimates and critical dependencies such as technology developments.

What it is not – It is not a prediction of what might happen in various scenarios, and it is not a model to get us to a temperature destination eg 2 or 2.7°C.

What it is is the baseline plan we manage against until evidence requires a controlled change.

For the climate project, the objective baseline remains Paris.

The climate effort had fragmented baseline elements — the Paris goals, country plans (Nationally Determined Contributions, NDCs), analytical pathways, scenarios, milestones,— but no single integrated delivery baseline.

So a key act now is to simultaneously reconcile those original commitments and attempt the first integrated working baseline.

In project language –

The objective baseline — held (Paris, < 2°C)
The delivery baseline — developing and needing project controls

The Paris Agreement has in effect created a climate mega-project, but an odd one.

Take the climate “mega-project” compared to conventional project delivery systems:

Set a completion criterion (2°C, stretch 1.5°C)

→ Began executing thousands of uncoordinated work packages (solar, wind, CCS, nuclear, hydrogen, batteries, EVs, geo-thermal, low-carbon fuels…)

→ Discover the effective / ineffective design through deployment

→ And now – perhaps – gather enough information to contemplate an integrated design basis.

Most project plans would start with a clear design, and then the detailed engineering plans first and work to execute and construct them: this one executes various engineering concepts and then discovers the grand design and plan in retrospect.

This is not unknown – large IT projects, even the internet can be described this way.

But so far this activity still does not offer a design concept for the climate project, and how well we are doing in delivering it.

No agreed answer yet to how the temperature control outcome is produced: is it through solar and wind, through nuclear, through carbon capture, through behaviour change and efficiency, through some combination of these or a technology X not yet specified?

And it still has no explicit cost and schedule, beyond various estimates, scenarios and outlooks.

It also has no project organisation with the authority to own project progress, costs and milestones, check against them and hold anyone to account.

In project terms, Paris set an objective without constituting an integrated plan.

This is not a criticism of the early diplomatic and analytical efforts.

But it is a description of the climate project delivery problem.

When the key project objective requires cooperation between nearly two hundred sovereign states, each with its own politics, its own capital constraints and its own veto, you do not get a project schedule.

You at best get an accord.

That is what was achievable.

But an accord is not a plan: the problem is though, by having an explicit project objective that is well publicised, we have spent a decade treating it as one.

The consequence is now visible.

We have almost certainly breached the stretch target of 1.5°C.

Emissions are not falling fast enough, if at all, although it is likely a high-level plateau has been achieved. And this acts also as a major project signal, as it links closely to the objective.

There is a robust near-linear relationship between cumulative CO₂ emissions and warming, allowing a solid carbon budget to be estimated: in 2018 we calculated we had about 580 billion tonnes of CO2 we could emit and stay below 1.5degC, with a 50% chance.

In project terms that is known as a contingency – in normal projects this is usually expressed as the amount of money or time we have added to the plan estimate – as a buffer against events and errors. We used carbon emitted as a best alternative measure.

By early 2026 we had used up all but around170 billion tonnes of this carbon contingency, meaning that at our current rate of emissions, 42 billion tonnes per year (5 tonnes per human), we have about four years left before it is all gone, end 2029.

So – breaching the stretch target should be no surprise.

We had the clear warning signal for over a decade.

In that sense the temperature violation is a lagging project indicator – it confirms what we expected.

Emissions are more a current variable – telling us today what the status is.

And deployment of technologies or policies against a plan to reduce them are leading indicators – suggesting what should now be prioritised or reprioritised.

In sum – we need to re-baseline the project – we need to create a new plan.

And yet. Here is the thing.

In lock-step with the climate objectives is an underlying energy transition: staying with fossil fuel combustion which creates CO2 as waste and pollution, would leave us fully exposed to the volatilities of unchecked global temperature rise.

Hence the pivot over the past few decades to alternatives: zero or low-carbon energy sources as a substitute, to lower climate risk as fast as possible.

And here there is a better story – the energy transition on several major fronts is accelerating, some even ahead of “plan” or expectations at least — solar power, wind power, large scale storage batteries, electric vehicles and other electrification industries are becoming an economically preferred system, not merely an environmentally desirable one.

In project parlance, whilst the emissions / temperature levels are a negative variance to plan (ie behind expectations) wind, solar, batteries and electrotech such as EVs, are a positive variance to plan (ie doing better than imagined).

Both things (temperature target breached with emissions at a high plateau, but new technologies arriving more quickly) can be true at once.

The contradiction is not a failure of the original idea.

It is what happens when a project runs without an integrated project plan or dedicated programme control function.

The red signal of emissions persisting should have caused a resultant activity in the plan to address the negative variation: a shift in capital allocation, or a prioritisation of effective technologies the key examples.

The useful move now is not to abandon the target climate objective, but also not to pretend it is still on schedule.

It is to do what any competent project does when reality overtakes the original plan:

– recognise the reality,

– preserve the objective,

– change the execution plan using new knowledge gained in the project

A re-baseline, in project phrasing.

But a re-baseline is legitimate only if it records rather than conceals the original variance.

The original objective remains visible; assumptions are changed because reality has changed.

Otherwise re-baselining is simply moving the goalposts.

A re-baseline is not an admission of failure. It is a normal, disciplined project act.

Every large programme does it, usually more than once.

The original baseline has moved. 1.5°C is no longer the planning case; the new planning case is overshoot.

And overshoot is no longer a scenario, it is the observed trajectory.

Recognition means writing down what has actually happened, not what we hoped would happen.

Much climate reporting still measures progress against the old plan as though nothing has changed — announcing record solar additions in the same breath as record emissions, without reconciling the two.

Many scenarios still record emissions targets for 1.5degC that involve almost impossible technical deployments aligned with a sudden collective policy consensus.

That is not a realistic plan being executed.

It is a disconnected series of desired outcomes.

Second, preserve the objective. This is where a re-baseline differs from abandonment.

The goal — limiting warming, minimising peak temperature, shortening the duration of overshoot — remains and is expressed in the UN report.

Every tenth of a degree still matters, and every single year spent above 1.5°C still adds major long-term risk.

What changes is not the destination.

What changes is the route and the pace required to reach it.

Third, change the execution plan and unearth the critical path. This is the part almost nobody is doing.

Without an integrated plan, the climate project has no “critical path”.

The critical path of any major project is a sequence of critical tasks – if any task on this path is delayed by even one day, the final completion date of the whole project slips by one day too.

An integrated plan needs to make that critical path clear and transparent.

While we have likely missed the original stretch target, we have still learned an enormous amount via the active pursuit of it.

If the old plan assumed a certain mix of technologies would deploy at a certain speed, and they have not, then the plan should be rewritten — not the target.

If solar and batteries have outperformed while grids and permitting have underperformed, then capital, policy attention and institutional effort must move accordingly.

That is what a re-baseline does: it learns from project actions – and then reallocates scarce resources against the actual critical path such as electric grids – not the one assumed previously such as renewable supply capacity.

In that example – if we are ahead on renewable capacity an integrated plan reallocates spare capital to the grid.

Conversely, with no integrated plan the climate project cannot see its critical path – it is guessing what is on it. Perhaps spending excess capital on solar deployment when grid capacity would better retain the cost and schedule.

And it is rare that an integrated plan retains “all of the above” for energy technologies and policies and generates multiple often contradictory scenarios. It is forced to select among them to keep to cost and schedule.

But we know the Climate Project is an odd one – so as we analyse it we should expect no single stable critical path: it is likely to move round at global and country level,

China may have a very different critical path eg less EV / electrotech investment vs more coal retirement compared to the path for the EU or US – where investment in electrotech remains behind plan.

If the climate project can never have a project manager, it can still have project controls.

Absent a project manager it can still determine a baseline, a critical path (or paths) and a cost and schedule to monitor progress.

A project manager holds executive authority.

But – project controls hold the baseline, measure variance, and report what is actually happening — without owning the work.

In a normal project programme the two – Project Manager and Projects Control Lead – sit together.

In the not-so-normal climate project, only the second, integrated project controls function, is available. But it may be enough.

The project control function asks fundamental questions, constantly:

It asks:

• What was the plan?
• What is the dominant design concept?
• Where are we now?
• What are the key critical paths and what is now on them globally and by country
• What changed in the past 6 months?
• What is late?
• What is outperforming?
• What has become implausible?
• What corrective action follows?

It communicates the answers against the original and new baseline — for example the NDCs, the 2030 and 2035 milestones, the Net Zero dates — and lets the gaps speak for themselves.

This is deliberately unromantic work.

It does not advocate for solar over nuclear, or mitigation over adaptation, or ambition over realism.

It also has to deal with the fact that a single “design concept” is likely only going to be delivered or conceived in retrospect – eg “we achieved the climate target via the combination of ….”

It simply holds the best overall plan we have against reality and reports the delta.

That is precisely what makes it useful.

Climate debate under a target missed, under stress, seems to bifurcate into two positions (this is a rough summary, but it does condense a lot of latest commentary):

1.5°C is still achievable, keep saying it,

or

1.5°C has gone, pivot to adaptation.

Either way – both are more political, not project-based positions.

And neither answers the delivery question.

A project controls function dissolves the binary by refusing to take either side, and instead produces a more objective assessment: here is where the project actually stands against its baseline.

Three things make this function credible.

Independence — it cannot sit inside a negotiating body, or it becomes a party.

Evidence — it works from hard data, not relying on scenarios, and reports against physical progress measures: gigawatts connected, gigawatts approved – not gigawatts in a given scenario.

Consistency — it uses the same baseline every time, so that variance is measurable across time. Without that consistency, re-baselining becomes a habit of moving the goalposts. With it, it becomes a discipline.

None of this requires global governance reform, a new treaty, or anyone’s permission.

It requires a competent institution or globally agreed framework willing to hold the baseline and publish the differences —in public, and without advocating for anyone’s preferred outcome.

We’ll discuss this in more detail in Part 2

There is a forgiveness that has to be said out loud.

We set the climate objective before we knew the design to deliver it; but pursuing the objective helped us discover it.

In 2015, the plan could not have been written. Not by diplomats, not by engineers, likely not by anyone.

The technologies were too immature to select.

The costs were unknowable.

The learning rates did not exist yet, because the deployment had not yet happened.

Asking the world to produce a design concept, a cost estimate and a schedule for “avoiding dangerous warming” was asking for something no institution on earth could have delivered.

What was achievable was a target.

That is what we got.

It was not a failure of will. It was a condition then of the world.

A decade later, the condition of the world has changed. Its knowledge and its climate situation have altered.

A design concept has started to emerge – and now we can perhaps create a continuing design that we can better define, allowing better execution.

The design was not declared at a conference, or frozen via internal expert analysis.

It was selected somewhat in the wild by cost curves and manufacturing scale.

Solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, electrification – not because anyone declared them the winner, but because repeated deployment has increasingly demonstrated their efficiency, economics and scalability

That is not the standard concept selection process. But it is likely the climate project will never look like a standard phased project from concept to operation.

A schedule has emerged too.

Peak emissions. Peak coal. Peak oil demand.

These are climate plan milestones whether anyone calls them that.

They sit in the data, in the global technical reviews, in the observed trend lines.

A schedule is simply a sequence of dates against which progress can be measured.

Ten years of deployment bought us the numbers that ten years of negotiation could not. The cost we could not devise in 2015 is more priceable now.

This is the odd shape of the climate project.

It was a de facto networked programme in which the design is still being discovered during execution rather than fixed before sanction.

That inversion is why it has always felt unmanageable.

It is not that the world failed to plan. It is that the plan could only be written after the attempt had started.

Which means the first task of project control is not to impose a plan.

It is to notice the one that has quietly begun assembling itself, so now hold it against the original objective, and write it down.

Deriving the climate project concept, cost and schedule retrospectively after creating its ultimate target is not just tidying up.

It is the act that converts a target into something that can be delivered, measured, and corrected.

Then governance remains the genuine gap.

We could not write this plan in 2015. We can draft it now.

The megaproject disciplines reveal what the climate effort is missing.

The analogy does not tell us that climate can be managed like a project.

It tells us which project disciplines now become valuable.

Coda, and Part 2

In Part 2 we change gears and propose a practical Action Plan.

And our plan will not start with primary energy consumed, but with the useful energy services delivered, and work backwards.

That is what we have learned.

The post The Climate Project After 1.5°C appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

Recent months have reinforced the case for accelerating action on the energy transition and climate, particularly from a European perspective.

• this summer has been like no other in Europe, with five major heatwaves across the continent and provisional data from the UK Met Office showing temperatures in London approximately 4°C above the long-term baseline average (1991-2020);
• internationally, 2026 has been marked by a series of extreme weather events, from the tragic landslide in Nepal caused by a melting glacier to a deadly winter storm bringing widespread fatalities across North America;
• all this against the backdrop of a super El Niño likely to generate even more extreme weather across the globe in the coming months;
• growing recognition, reflected in UK Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary of State Miatta Fahnbulleh’s warning that the war in Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz have shown how exposure to global fossil fuel markets raises energy costs;
• the war has also led to an explosion in electric vehicle sales, particularly in Asia. Across the first half of 2026, electric car sales in Europe grew around 35-40% compared with the same period in 2025; in the UK it’s up about 25% over the same period;
• according to WindEurope, Europe installed 8.8GW in the first half of 2026, a 30% increase on H1 2025. Renewables provided 53.1% of electricity generated by the UK’s Major Power Producers between March and May, with renewable generation up 22% year on year.;
• a breakthrough on the costs of energy storage, with global benchmark costs for four-hour battery storage projects falling by 27% year-on-year in 2025.

On the face of it, the case for accelerating the transition has never been stronger. But despite this, the state of multilateral action on climate change can probably be summed up by the collective shrug in response to the Climate Summit convened by the outgoing UN Secretary-General in New York on 23 September. In his final UNGA week, Antonio Guterres again argued that fossil fuel expansion “defies science, economics and common sense”. In language reflecting an increasing sense of alarm and urgency, he talked about this being the last generation “who can avert climate catastrophe”.

The weakened state of climate multilateralism is often attributed to a geopolitical environment in which political consensus has fractured and climate science is more openly challenged. This is evident not only in North America but in several European countries. But are there still opportunities this autumn for the pendulum to swing back towards concerted policy action that reflects the favourable platform that science, technology and economics are providing?

All roads on climate tend to lead to the COP, which this year will meet in Antalya, Turkey, from 9-20 November. COP31 will feature an unusual co-hosting arrangement between Turkey and Australia, alongside a pre-COP meeting hosted by Fiji and Tuvalu from 5-8 October. Crucially, the Pacific gathering will give small island states a platform to highlight the existential threat posed by climate change.

As for COP31 itself, the co-hosts face the challenge of providing a central focus for a COP where no single major negotiated decision is expected and which is being described as an “implementation COP”. But two key themes are emerging:

• a “35 by 35” global electrification target, designed to accelerate the transition by increasing the share of global final energy demand met by electricity to 35% by 2035, up from the present 20%;
• ecosystem resilience, and the impact of severe climate shocks on food and water systems.

Serious discussion of both issues will be welcome. Yet many increasingly view the COP process, and the wider UN system, as unable to move beyond being a talking shop. Which is why, perhaps even more than is usual at a COP, some of the more consequential action in Antalya may take place in the margins outside the formal negotiations.

This would be consistent with the most significant outcomes from COP30 in Belém, with the emergence of two separate “coalitions of the willing” to work on international roadmaps: to transition away from fossil fuels (TAFF); and to halt and reverse global deforestation.

This TAFF initiative in particular will be put to the test of COP politics, even if it’s not on the formal agenda. Twelve months on from its birth in Belém, and seven months since the coalition of nearly 60 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, to kickstart work on a global TAFF process, there will be pressure to start turning high-level ambitions into concrete plans. This will mean attention on the Netherlands, which co-hosted Santa Marta with a Colombian government that has since been replaced by a new administration not committed to the initiative, and Ireland and Tuvalu, which will host a “Santa Marta 2.0” in the Pacific next July. These governments will want to show whether their initiative can work alongside the COP process and even restore some faith in the value of international cooperation to tackle global challenges. Other members of the coalition may also face questions about whether their domestic policies match their claims to international leadership: from the UK Government, which will also take on the G20 presidency in 2027, to Canadian and Australia governments, where fossil fuel production policy is moving in a different direction.

Looking beyond COP31, there are still grounds for optimism, whether through existing institutions or coalitions such as TAFF. The possibility, if recent reports are to be believed, that China could host COP33 in 2029 could be a game-changer, another Paris moment for the UNFCCC and multilateralism to demonstrate that it can deliver more than rhetoric. But back in the present, the science is making clear that delaying meaningful action, even now, will only do further harm. As the Belém Declaration on a TAFF spelled out nearly 12 months ago, action needs to be accelerated.

As progressives gather in Antalya, they may therefore do well to keep two overarching priorities at top of mind.

First, revisit the Belém Declaration as a constant reminder that limiting global temperature rises requires a “shared determination to work collectively towards a just, orderly and equitable transition away from fossil fuels”. This work will require, as the Declaration detailed, a focus on economic diversification, reducing structural dependence on fossil fuel revenues and phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. Progressive policymakers will also need to consider how to support a step-change in finance for the Global South, given the vulnerability of many emerging and developing economies to both the transition and the physical impacts of climate change. The work that has begun since the Santa Marta conference – both in the Santa Marta workplan and the separate but closely linked Brazilian COP Presidency TAFF exercise – will give policymakers the tools to start implementing TAFF in practice. That collective effort can begin in the discussions in and around COP31, even if not yet in the formal negotiations.

Second, one of the most positive developments this year has been the reframing of climate around energy security, risk and resilience. The statement by the UK Prime Minister at the same UNGA week where the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit yielded little tangible progress, that “the climate crisis is now a national security threat for countries around the world”, is a sign of an evolving narrative. As is this line from the recent Green Central Banking newsletter: “maybe resilience, for lack of a better word, is a new, pragmatic way to ensure climate action and collaboration still take place in an ever more geopolitically fragmented world.”

COP delegates will also be mindful that they are convening just after the US mid-terms on 3 November.

Many of the underlying conditions (economic, technological and scientific) are in place for governments to make this autumn one of significant progress on climate ambition. The case for framing the transition around economic opportunity and 21st-century energy security is clear. Policymakers may remain cautious in the current geopolitical environment; but this is time to seize the moment.

The post Can a Sweltering Summer Create an Autumn of Opportunity for the Transition? appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.