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

The Climate Project Baseline Emerges

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.

Meanwhile, the energy transition carries on

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 Climate Project Re-baseline

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.

Recognise reality.

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.

Project Controls and the Design Concept

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

Writing the Plan We Couldn’t Write in 2015

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.