Ten humanitarian trends to keep an eye on in 2026
Ever since the 2015 Paris Agreement, any suggestion that the world might fail to limit global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels has been taboo, particularly at forums like the UN climate summits, or COPs. But in late 2025, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told The Guardian, “we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years”. He repeated the claim at COP30 in Brazil. What’s important to note is that 1.5C isn’t just some arbitrary number. In an assessment echoed recently by Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley, scientists at Climate Analytics described it as a “planetary limit beyond which climate impacts escalate and risk triggering catastrophic tipping points”. Experts are still debating what counts as permanent versus temporary overshoot (the Paris Agreement speaks of a 20-year average), but 2023, 2024, and 2025 have been the hottest years on record and the consequences are already stark and increasingly frequent. The past year has seen several major humanitarian crises attributed – at least in part – to the climate crisis: supercharged monsoon floods claimed more than 1,750 lives in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia; while Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest Atlantic storms on record, flattened entire communities in Jamaica. The projected overshoot of 1.5C means we should expect a lot more of the same in the years to come. As Zinta Zommers, climate science lead at the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, put it recently: “It’s going to be a lot of burden on the humanitarian community, a lot more loss and damage, a lot more need for adaptation.”
Read more: To make progress, change the process
Despite the ever increasing severity of the climate crisis, the multilateral process in place for dealing with it is stagnating to the point of disintegration. Finding a lot more money for adaptation – desperately needed by lower-income countries to prepare for the worst impacts of climate change – was supposed to be a key outcome of COP30 in November. The summit failed to deliver not only on that crucial aim, but also on other climate goals vital for communities in crisis. The bigger picture is that COPs are making little tangible progress because of critical paradoxes in the system, not least that the process can be held hostage by countries that have no intention of ever meaningfully contributing to climate justice. Until this is accepted and dealt with openly – even if it means shifting the emphasis to climate processes outside of the consensus system – it is hard to see much of a path forward.
