Global warming acceleration, regulatory retreat

Global warming has nearly doubled its pace. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Regulation is retreating. The case for faster climate action has never been clearer or less convenient. Stratagem Partners perspective on a recent article published by the World Economic Forum.

Research published this month in Geophysical Research Letters found that the long-term rate of planetary warming has risen from under 0.2°C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to approximately 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years. That is the fastest rate on record since instrumental temperature monitoring began in 1880. On current trajectory, the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C threshold will be breached before 2030.

This is not a projection model. It is an empirical finding, confirmed across five independent global temperature datasets with statistical confidence exceeding 98%.

The EU formally approved a 90% emissions reduction target for 2040 in early March, an ambitious signal. In the same legislative period, Omnibus I came into force, reducing the number of companies subject to mandatory sustainability reporting under CSRD by approximately 85% and extending compliance timelines by two years or more. The destination has become more ambitious. Several of the obligations that would have accelerated progress have been relaxed.

The war in Iran has made the stakes harder to ignore. Since US and Israeli strikes on 28 February 2026, the Strait of Hormuz (through which approximately one-fifth of global oil supplies and one-fifth of global LNG pass each day) has been effectively closed to commercial shipping. Oil prices exceeded $100 per barrel on 9 March, for the first time since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Europe entered this shock with gas storage already at less than two-thirds of the level recorded a year earlier.

Those urging a pause on the energy transition in the name of energy security have the argument precisely backwards. Fossil fuel dependence is not a hedge against geopolitical risk, it is the mechanism through which geopolitical risk reaches every energy bill in the country.

For company boards, the error available right now is to read regulatory easing as a proxy for reduced risk. A company that defers its Scope 3 assessment because the mandatory deadline has shifted remains exposed to the physical, reputational, and financial consequences of operating in a warming world. Regulatory timelines and physical timelines have always been different things. They are now moving in opposite directions.

Today is World Water Day. It is also a day on which the scientific record tells us that, if current warming rates persist, the world has roughly four years before global temperatures permanently exceed the limits set in Paris. That is less than two strategic planning cycles.

Boards that cannot yet answer, with specificity, how their organisation performs under a 2°C or 2.5°C warming scenario are not managing climate risk, they are deferring it.