The State of Climate Action 2022 provides a comprehensive assessment of the global gap in climate action across the world’s highest-emitting systems, highlighting where recent progress made in reducing GHG emissions, scaling up carbon removal, and increasing climate finance must accelerate over the next decade to keep the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit warming to 1.5°C within reach.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C requires far-reaching transformations across power generation, buildings, industry, transport, land use, coastal zone management, and agriculture, as well as the immediate scale-up of technological carbon removal and climate finance. This report translates these transitions into 40 targets for 2030 and 2050, with measurable indicators. Transformations, particularly those driven by new technology adoption, often unfold slowly before accelerating after crossing a tipping point. Nearly a quarter of indicators assessed new technology adoption, with some already growing exponentially. This report considers such nonlinear change in its methodology. The transitions required to avoid the worst climate impacts are not happening fast enough. Of the 40 indicators assessed, none are on track to reach 2030 targets. Change is heading in the right direction at a promising but insufficient speed for 8 and in the right direction but well below the required pace for 17. Progress has stagnated for 3, while change for another 3 is heading in the wrong direction entirely. Data are insufficient to evaluate the remaining 9. This report also identifies underlying conditions that enable change—supportive policies, innovations, strong institutions, leadership, and shifts in social norms. Finance for climate action, for example, must increase nearly 13-fold to meet the estimated need in 2030.

This technical note accompanies the State of Climate Action series, part of Systems Change Lab. It describes our methods for identifying systems that must transform, translating these systemwide transformations into global mitigation targets for 2030 and 2050, and selecting indicators with accompanying datasets for us to use to monitor annual change. It also outlines our approach for assessing the world’s collective progress made toward near-term targets and categorizing recent efforts as on track, off track, well off track, headed in the wrong direction, or insufficient data. Finally, it details how we identify critical barriers to change and enabling conditions that can support transformations, as well as limitations to our methodology. Many of the methods underpinning this series remain unchanged from State of Climate Action 2021, although we identify small adjustments throughout. This technical note, then, serves as a companion document to State of Climate Action 2022 and to subsequent annual State of Climate Action reports, with updates made where applicable.