Climate TRACE puts first-half 2026 global greenhouse gas emissions at 29.7 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, just 0.2% above the same period in 2025. The United Nations Environment Programme’s own accounting says emissions need to fall by 55% from 2019 levels by 2035 to stay on a 1.5 degree pathway. A war that shut down roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade for months barely moved the number.
Climate TRACE’s satellite and sensor-based tracking, an independent measurement effort separate from the self-reported national inventories most governments rely on, found global emissions rose 56.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, a 0.2% increase to a preliminary total of 29.7 billion tonnes. Annualized, that trajectory would put 2026 in the same broad range as the 57.7 billion tonnes UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report attributed to full-year 2024, a level of consistency between two independently produced estimates that lends some confidence to the general order of magnitude even where the two accounting frameworks differ in scope and methodology. What that consistency also confirms is the scale of the gap between where emissions are and where they need to be. UNEP’s most recent assessment found that annual emissions must fall 55% below 2019 levels by 2035 to keep a 1.5 degree pathway plausible, and even the less demanding 2 degree pathway requires a 35% cut over the same period, reductions that imply sustained annual declines in the high single digits at minimum, not a rounding error of an increase.
The report’s own framing of the shipping sector illustrates why a flat topline number is a more troubling result than it first appears. Climate TRACE attributes the decline in shipping emissions to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a description that understates the scale of what actually happened. Iran closed the strait to commercial traffic on February 28, 2026, following US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets, and daily vessel crossings collapsed by more than 95% from pre-war levels within weeks, according to maritime tracking data, on a waterway that in 2025 carried roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne crude oil and petroleum product trade and close to a fifth of global liquefied natural gas shipments. A brief reopening under a June memorandum of understanding broke down within weeks, and by late July the conflict had passed its 140th day with both sides having declared the agreement void. Brent crude rose from around 75 dollars a barrel before the crisis to more than 100 dollars a barrel within days of the initial closure. Framed against that backdrop, the shipping emissions decline Climate TRACE reports is not a decarbonization achievement. It is the emissions signature of a war that shut down a large share of global maritime energy trade for most of the first half of the year, and the sector’s emissions would be expected to rebound, not continue declining, once shipping through the strait normalizes.
The more analytically interesting finding sits in the power sector, where the crisis did not produce the shift toward coal that a comparable shock arguably should have triggered. Climate TRACE found predominantly coal-fired power assets actually reduced emissions by 33.5 million tonnes, or 0.7%, in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, while gas-fired assets increased emissions by 10.9 million tonnes, or 0.7%, and net power sector emissions fell 22.9 million tonnes overall. That outcome is a departure from the pattern set in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cut European gas supply and pushed several countries back toward coal generation to cover the shortfall. Part of the explanation is structural: the 2026 disruption hit oil and LNG shipments moving through a specific maritime chokepoint, while the world’s largest coal consumers, China and India, draw the overwhelming majority of their coal from domestic mines rather than seaborne imports, limiting the mechanical path from a Hormuz-specific oil and gas shock to a coal substitution response the way a direct gas supply cutoff would. Part of the explanation is also that renewable capacity has grown enough in some of the power markets most exposed to gas price volatility to blunt the transmission from fossil fuel prices to fuel switching. In Spain, wind and solar growth had already cut the share of hours in which gas set electricity prices from 52% in 2021 to 9% in early 2026, insulating Spanish households from much of the price spike tied to this same conflict and demonstrating in a live market exactly the kind of substitution effect that, aggregated globally, shows up in Climate TRACE’s finding that renewable generation grew 7.7% year over year and gained 1.5 percentage points of global generation share while coal’s share fell 1.3 points and gas fell 0.6 points.
The country-level shifts Climate TRACE highlights are real but modest in absolute terms next to the size of the base. China’s emissions fell 25.4 million tonnes, or 0.3%, and US emissions fell 15.0 million tonnes, or 0.4%, combining for a decline of roughly 40 million tonnes across the two largest emitters. India’s 30.6 million tonne increase, Brazil’s 9.4 million tonnes and Vietnam’s 7.3 million tonnes combine to roughly 47 million tonnes of growth, which is what produces the framing that gains in the two largest emitters were largely offset by growth elsewhere. Both sets of numbers are small fractions of a percent of the 29.7 billion tonne global total, and the fact that they roughly offset each other is a description of two modest, unrelated national trends moving in opposite directions rather than evidence of a meaningful structural rebalancing in where the world’s emissions originate.
Road transportation stands out as the one sector where growth was both large in absolute terms and broadly distributed, adding 68.3 million tonnes, or 2.0%, globally in the first half of 2026, more than double the percentage growth rate of the overall emissions total and the single largest driver of the period’s increase. That growth occurred even as manufacturing emissions fell 30.1 million tonnes and power sector emissions fell 22.9 million tonnes, meaning transportation alone was large enough to erase most of the combined decline from two sectors that together represent a larger share of global emissions. Buildings and waste each grew a more modest 0.6%, in line with population and urbanization trends rather than any acute shock. Set against a required trajectory of sustained double-digit percentage declines within the next decade, a period defined by one of the more severe global energy market disruptions in recent memory producing a shipping-driven emissions decline that is almost certain to reverse once the underlying conflict resolves, and with the sector showing the strongest organic growth being one, road transport, that receives comparatively little of the policy attention directed at power generation, the first half of 2026 reads less as evidence of decarbonization progress than as a reminder of how large an external shock is required to even briefly flatten a curve that policy alone has not yet managed to bend downward.
