The world’s emissions are slowing down. Transport’s are not. New Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) release, alongside UNEP’s overshoot report, shows why the transition away from fossil fuels will be won or lost on our roads, rails, ports and runways.
In 2025, global greenhouse gas emissions grew by 0.7%. After two years of faster growth, that almost sounds like good news.
Then look at transport. According to the EDGAR 2026 release from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, transport emissions grew by 1.5%, twice the economy-wide rate. The sector produces 16.3% of global emissions. International aviation and international shipping both hit all-time highs. Combined, they emitted 1.39 gigatonnes (Gt) CO2e. If they were a country, they would be the sixth-largest emitter on Earth, ahead of Indonesia, Brazil and Japan. But they sit outside every national climate plan and are barely managed by aspirational goals.
The world is finally starting to bend the emission curve. Transport is still pushing it up.
Overshoot is not a risk anymore. It is the trajectory.
UNEP’s new report, Limiting Overshoot, is blunt. Global warming will exceed 1.5°C within the next few years. Even the most ambitious pathways now peak at 1.6 to 1.8°C. About 130 GtCO2 of budget remains for a 50% chance of holding 1.5°C, roughly three years of current emissions. Every five years of high emissions adds 0.1°C to the peak. And, in UNEP’s words, “there are no benign scenarios above 1.5°C.” And thoses climate realities have already been materialised with extreme weather events, from the flooded street of Kenya to the repetitive and all time high heatwaves and drough of Europe, while the pacific is bracing for a record high El Nino.
Put the transport numbers into that frame. Transport emits close to 9 GtCO2 a year: the sector burns about 7% of the entire remaining 1.5°C budget, every single year. Now in 2025, global warming is close to 1.4°C above pre-industrial levels and 1.5°C may be reached by 2030.
So the real questions now are how high we go above 1.5°C, how long we stay there, and how devastating the impact will be. Transport, still 95% fossil-fuelled and emissions growing at double the global rate, is the decisive variable that could tip the balance for good or bad.To support 1.5°C compatible trajectories, transport emissions must fall at least 22% by 2035. Under current policies, they are set to grow 19%. Every year that gap stays open, the peak rises and the return below 1.5°C moves further away.
The cheapest tonnes on the table
UNEP puts transport’s mitigation potential at 4.8 GtCO2e a year by 2035 (more than half of everything transport emits today). To picture it: 4.8 gigatonnes is more than India, the world’s third-largest emitter, produces in a whole year. It is more than the entire European Union and Japan combined.
And most of it does not depend on technology. Avoid and Shift measures, meaning inclusive and efficient urban planning public transport, walking, cycling and moving freight to rail and waterways, can deliver 40 to 60% of the cuts transport needs. Safe walking and cycling infrastructure alone can cut transport emissions by 20 to 50%. UNEP lists shifts in urban mobility towards public transport, walking, cycling among its high-potential, low-cost options.
Yet national climate plans point continues to focus in on vehicles and fuels the latest NDCs, 65% of transport actions focus on improving vehicles and fuels. Only 27% target Shift, and just 8% target Avoid. Electrification matters, railways around the world are mostly electric; electric cars reached 25% of sales in 2025, while electric two-wheelers reached 15%, electric trucks 9% and electric buses 5%. But around 63 million combustion cars were sold the same year. Without Avoid and Shift, we are not solving the problem. We are electrifying it.
Say it plainly: phase out fossil fuels, a global direction, and bold measure for transport
Transport burns roughly half of the world’s oil. There is no transition away from fossil fuels without a transition in transport, and it is time the sector said so without hedging, to move from what evidence has been showing for decades, to what the investment should prioritise.
The numbers make the case. 95.4% of transport energy still comes from fossil fuels, a share that has barely moved in fifty years. Governments spend around USD 7 trillion a year on fossil fuel subsidies. At COP28, countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels and phase out inefficient subsidies while accelerating the reduction of emissions from road transport on a range of pathways. Two years later, only a handful of the 128 new NDCs even mention subsidy reform, and the COP30 decision dropped fossil fuels altogether.
A fossil fuel phase-out for transport means ending fossil lock-in, including the practice of labelling fossil-intensive infrastructure as “climate finance”. It means reforming subsidies justly and in sequence, putting affordable public transport, walking and cycling in place before prices move, because reforms imposed on people without alternatives fail. It means cutting demand first and then cleaning the supply. And it means giving transport a real place in the fossil fuel transition processes now taking shape, from Brazil’s TAFF Roadmap to the Santa Marta process.
The 2026 oil crisis has made one more thing obvious: fossil-dependent transport is not only a climate problem. It is an energy security and cost-of-living problem.
When transport breaks down, everything else follows
Overshoot also means living with the damage, and transport is where weather events result in most damage.
Climate disasters already cause USD 15 to 22 billion of direct damage to transport infrastructure every year. Under current policies, the sector faces the most severe projected infrastructure loss of any sector by 2050. Yet transport receives just about 3% of adaptation finance.
Freight is one of the major blind spots. It moves 171 trillion tonne-kilometres of goods a year, three-quarters of them by sea, and fewer than 4% of adaptation actions in national plans target it. Climate extremes at ports alone put USD 81 billion in trade and USD 122 billion in economic activity at risk every year. We have already seen what a drought in the Panama Canal does to global shipping, and what a heatwave does to European and North American rail tracks, and transport workers not being able to work.But it’s not the only blind spot for investment on a resilient and 1.5°c proofed transport system, so are rural access, walking, cycling and the popular transport.
Then there is food. UNEP projects global food production could fall by up to 14% by 2050 without adaptation. But a harvest is only food if it reaches people. When a bridge washes away, a port closes or a river runs too low for barges, food that was successfully grown never gets to the market. For the one billion people who live more than two kilometres from an all-weather road, a broken transport link is a food crisis. Transport is the lifeline of our societies and our shared prosperity, for food, but also for social development, access to health, education and the preservation of biodiversity.
Every road, rail line and port built today will operate in a world above 1.5°C. We either build for that world now, or suffer catastrophic consequences and pay to rebuild later.
Paris works when it is implemented
None of this is a reason to give up. It is a reason to move faster.
Before the Paris Agreement, the world was heading for 4 to 5°C of global warming. The first round of national plans brought that down to around 3.7°C. Today’s pledges point to 2.1 to 2.8°C. In a decade, collective action has taken more than two degrees off the projected future.
People want to go further. The UNDP Peoples’ Climate Vote found that 80% of people across 77 countries want their governments to strengthen climate commitments. The transport community has already started to answer: at COP30, 11 countries committed to cut transport energy demand by 25% by 2035, and the COP31 Presidency has set a target to meet 35% of final energy demand with electricity by 2035.
If we act now, the peak can stay closer to 1.6°C than 1.8°C, and a return below 1.5°C remains within reach this century. UNEP calls this “the best remaining option to protect vulnerable people, reduce losses and secure a livable future for all.”
Antalya is the next milestone
At COP31 in Antalya (9 to 20 November), SLOCAT will launch a process to develop a Global Goal for Transport, in the first year of the UN Decade of Sustainable Transport. We are asking governments to endorse the “Global Transport Effort”, COP30 Transport Declaration, write a first pathway for transport into their national plans, make Avoid and Shift the backbone of their NDCs, and build transport and freight resilience into their adaptation plans.
The evidence is there. The solutions are there. The public mandate is there. And this where SLOCAT aims to play its part, with its partnership, connecting to government and UNFCCC processes or funders, through regional hubs, while showcasing solutions through the UN Decade of Sustainable Transport and the Global Goal for Transport. 2026 can be remembered as the year transport emissions started to fall, or as the year the sector let the overshoot grow. That is a political choice, and it is being made now.
