Evolving climate architecture
PAKISTAN stands at a crossroads as it prepares to attend COP31 in Turkiye next week. Every October, the Emissions Gap Report brings bad news, and every October we read it as a scorecard of how far the world is from Paris. This year, it is not a progress report. It is notice that the Paris benchmark has been breached. The United Nations Environment Programme’s 2026 report concludes that the chance to hold warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius with no or limited overshoot “is gone”. The task now is to “minimise overshoot and return to 1.5°C”. The target survives; its meaning has flipped. No longer a