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The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released its 2025 Annual Report on Wednesday, February 11, 2026, highlighting progress made last year on key environmental challenges through international cooperation despite ongoing global geopolitical tensions.
The report shows how environmental action can deliver major economic and public health benefits. Highlights include:
- UNEP’s seventh Global Environment Outlook found that stronger environmental policies could add trillions to global GDP, prevent millions of deaths, and help lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and hunger.
- The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution was established after three years of negotiations under UNEP’s leadership. The panel will provide policymakers with independent science to tackle the growing threat of pollution and waste, complementing panels on climate and biodiversity.
- At the seventh session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-7), countries adopted 11 resolutions and three decisions, including on critical minerals for the energy transition, glacier melt, wildfires, antimicrobial resistance, coral reefs, the sustainable use of AI and more.
- The landmark agreement to protect biodiversity in the high seas (BBNJ Agreement) entered into force as international law in January 2026, after UNEP supported dozens of countries to ratify the agreement.
- With UNEP support, more than 170,000 square kilometres of natural spaces – an area larger than New York state – have come under protection or more sustainable management, expected to benefit 2.3 million people.
- UNEP’s International Methane Emissions Observatory detected methane leaks from oil and gas installations in 36 countries. Alerts to governments led to the repair of at least 19 leaks, which combined had been pumping out 1,200 tonnes of methane every 24 hours. Through the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 (OGMP 2.0), 150 oil and gas companies – with assets in over 90 countries, representing 42 per cent of global production – now transparently report methane emissions data.
- World Environment Day 2025, hosted by the Republic of Korea, was marked by more than 3,000 events across 155 countries, uplifting solutions to plastic pollution.
Despite progress, UNEP’s scientific assessments show the scale of the challenge ahead:
- The Emissions Gap Report 2025 revealed that even with existing climate pledges, the world will warm by 2.3 to 2.5°C, with a likely overshoot of the 1.5°C threshold.
- The Adaptation Gap Report 2025 found that nations will need up to US$365 billion a year by 2035 to adapt to climate change – around 12 times what they have access to now.
As conflicts continue across the world, UNEP continued to inform recovery efforts and provide recommendations for reversing environmental damage in the Gaza Strip, Ukraine and Sudan.
Reflecting on the past year and looking ahead at 2026, UNEP’s Executive Director, Inger Andersen, said: “Even amid global tensions, 2025 was a year in which nations showed that environmental multilateralism is the beacon that rises high above the fog of geopolitical differences to rally the world in united action.”
“UNEP remains at the centre of these global efforts to tackle climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, land degradation and desertification, and pollution and waste – and create a better and more resilient future for people and planet,” she added.
UNEP’s Annual Report also emphasizes the critical need for a steady source of predictable and flexible financing for UNEP to carry out its mandate, particularly through Member State support to its core fund, the Environment Fund. In 2025, 106 Member States contributed to the fund, with a record number contributing their full financial share. This helped enable UNEP’s global work in 151 countries.
