2025 REPORTS AND PAPERS

U.S. WITHDRAWS FROM THE PARIS AGREEMENT AGAIN

On January 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement again.  U.S. from the Paris Agreement again.

REPORTS

• In June, from Climate Action Tracker comes an exploration of Paris Agreement’s Article 6 and concludes that if all current climate pledges are met, the world is still on track for 2.6˚C of warming by 2100. A mid-year check on 2035 climate plans finds only 11 out of 40 countries analyzed have submitted targets for 2035. 
• Also in June, a team of 60 scientists across 17 countries published a critical paper in Earth System Science Data updating climate indicators from IPCC’s 2021 Sixth Assessment Report. One such indicator is EEI, or Earth’s Energy Imbalance, a measure of the amount of heat the planet absorbs vs. emits, which has doubled since 1975. The study identifies 2020-2030 as a critical decade for climate action, as the world is currently positioned to overshoot 1.5C within the next three years. 
• In July, the Environmental Law & Policy Center released an updated report on climate change impacts for the Great Lakes region: An Assessment of the Impacts of Climate Change on the Great Lakes: by Scientists and Experts from Universities and Institutions in the Great Lakes Region. The update to the original 2019 report confirms that climate change is having massive impacts on the lakes, which provide drinking water for 40 million people, with warming temperatures, fluctuating water levels, more severe algal blooms, declining fish populations, and shifting tree species. 
• In July, an Environmental Research study links food price surges to extreme weather events. According to the study, food price spikes will become more common with intensifying heat, sparking wide political, economic, nutritional and social impacts on societies globally. The lead author calls the paper a “call to action… to consider these wider effects of food price increases in response to climate change for our societies.”
• Another July report came from UNEP as they released the newest edition of Frontiers, The Weight of Time: Facing a new age of challenges for people and ecosystems, which identifies four emerging environmental issues: reactivation of microbes in a warming cryosphere; barrier removal for river restoration; growing old in a changing environment; and remobilization of legacy pollutants by flood events. 
• Also from UNEP this year are reports on decarbonization in the video game industry, sustainable transition for agribusiness, accelerating the global transition to cleaner fuels and vehicles, and air pollution in Southeast Asia. 
• The Interconnected Risks report for 2025, Turning Over a New Leaf, produced by the United Nations University-Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), asks the fundamental question “if we know what we need to do, why aren’t we doing it?” It addresses this question through a theory of deep change, identifying 5 systemic changes: rethinking waste by composting and caring for materials; realigning with nature by learning to coexist with natural processes instead of dominating or controlling them; reconsidering responsibility by shifting to a global community and global mindset; reimagining the future by embracing long-term thinking; and redefining value from economic wealth to planetary health. 

CONSEQUENCES OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

With the Trump Administration withdrawing the U.S. once again from the Paris Agreement in January 2025 and downplaying reports like the National Climate Assessment, the future of critical reports on climate change is uncertain. 

• The National Climate Assessment’s website went dark in July 2025, and the federal staff responsible for drafting the next version were fired in April. 
• Not only are existing resources on climate change threatened, but the Trump administration is potentially engaged in actively spreading misinformation through misleading reports. The Department of Energy published a report in July 2025 offering a “critical assessment of the conventional narrative of climate change.” The report declares that “carbon-dioxide induced warming appears to be less damaging than commonly believed” and that “mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial.” However, according to a WIRED story, nine scientists claim their own research was misinterpreted in the report and that authors were “cherry-picking data, misrepresenting findings, drawing erroneous conclusions, or leaving out relevant context.” Watch one special from Democracy Now on the dangerous misinformation of the report.