Israel is unprepared for climate change and climate-related emergencies, and the directorate established to address the issue has been staffed by just a single employee throughout the past six years, according to a State Comptroller report published last week.
The report summarizes an audit conducted between March and October 2025 and serves as a follow-up to two previous reports published in 2021 and 2024, both of which identified serious deficiencies. The latest audit examined the government's response to those findings. According to the comptroller, most of the deficiencies have been addressed only to a limited extent, if at all.
At the beginning of the report, the State Comptroller emphasizes that Israel is located in a climate “hot spot” and is therefore expected to be among the first regions significantly affected by many of the consequences of global warming. As a result, the comptroller argues, it is critical for Israel to make use of the relatively short window of opportunity still available to prepare, thereby reducing damage and saving lives.
“This report once again raises a red flag for the government and its head,” the executive summary states in bold. “It makes clear, in unequivocal terms, that the warning signs are on the wall.”
The report examines two distinct aspects of climate policy: Mitigation – measures aimed at reducing the drivers of climate change, primarily by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and adaptation – preparing for a changing climate by increasing resilience and planning for extreme climate-related scenarios.
No 2035 Emissions Reduction Targets, No Climate Law Enacted
According to the report's findings, Israel has consistently failed to meet the mitigation targets it has set for itself. For example, Israel's national emissions reduction target called for greenhouse gas emissions to be 27% below 2015 levels. However, at the time the previous report was written, existing policies were expected to achieve a reduction of no more than 12%.
The State Comptroller notes that some progress has been made since the previous report. Current projections indicate that emissions will be reduced by approximately 19% by 2030—a significant improvement, but still well short of the government's stated target.
In addition, although Israel was expected to submit updated 2035 emissions reduction targets by April 2025, no targets had been submitted by that deadline. As of the conclusion of the audit, the government had not even adopted an official position on the matter.
The State Comptroller also delivers sharp criticism of Israel's transition to renewable energy. In 2021, the government resolved to establish 2050 renewable energy targets, allocating one year to complete the task. In practice, however, despite the issue having already been highlighted in the previous State Comptroller's report, no progress has been made. To this day, Israel continues to operate without defined 2050 emissions reduction or renewable energy targets.
On the other hand, the State Comptroller notes that, compared with the previous report, which projected that Israel would reach only 19% renewable energy by 2030, significant progress has since been made. The current assessment is that Israel is now expected to reach approximately 25.5% renewable energy by 2030.
Although this still falls short of the government's 30% target for 2030, the comptroller concludes that this is an area in which the government has addressed previous shortcomings to a significant extent.
Another area in which the comptroller commends the government's progress on mitigation is the introduction of a carbon tax, which is intended to assign an environmental cost to products whose production generates high carbon emissions. The previous audit found that Israel had not yet implemented such a tax. The new report notes that a carbon tax has since been approved and adjusted to account for its impact on domestic industry, although those adjustments have themselves drawn some criticism.
The report notes, however, that despite recommendations made in previous State Comptroller reports, virtually no progress has been made toward enacting a comprehensive Climate Law.
In practice, legislation for a Climate Law, whose emissions targets were themselves widely regarded as relatively unambitious, was introduced during the previous Knesset, advanced in the current Knesset, and approved in its first reading. However, the bill was last discussed by the Knesset Interior and Environment Committee in late 2024, and has not progressed since.
Adaptation: No National Plan, No Interagency Coordination, and a Directorate That Exists Only on Paper
In the area of climate adaptation, the State Comptroller identified numerous shortcomings, particularly in planning and preparedness. Foremost among them, the comptroller notes that Israel still does not have a national government plan for dealing with climate change, despite the publication of two previous State Comptroller reports calling for one. In addition, the dedicated government directorate established to coordinate climate adaptation efforts has remained largely a paper entity, existing in name but with little practical capacity to carry out its mandate.
Regarding the government’s adaptation plan, the report states that despite a formal government directive requiring ministries to submit detailed implementation plans, two years after the deadline only 3 out of 28 ministries reviewed had submitted a structured plan that included both a timeline and a budget.
The remaining ministries either did not submit any plan at all, or submitted plans lacking essential components such as timelines or budgeting—an approach the comptroller describes as a “declarative submission only” rather than a functional implementation plan.
As for the directorate established to handle climate adaptation, the situation is described as equally severe. In 2018, the government decided to establish a dedicated Climate Adaptation Directorate, led by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The directorate was intended to drive Israel’s national response to climate change, oversee government ministries, and lead the structural changes required for national climate resilience and adaptation.
In practice, the report finds that—both in the two previous audits and in the current one—only a single position has been approved in the directorate over the past six years.
More seriously, the directorate, which is meant to operate and coordinate across all government ministries, functions without clearly defined authority to compel other ministries to act, and relies on an ad-hoc budget. Over six years, this budget has totaled only 1.3 million shekels, a negligible amount relative to the scale of the national challenge it was created to address.
In addition to the directorate, the comptroller notes that the Ministerial Committee on Climate Change, established in 2023, has not held a single meeting since its creation.
The State Comptroller also notes that as of 2024, no major economic body in Israel, including the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economy, had conducted a comprehensive assessment of the impact of climate change on the national economy.
In 2025, some initial steps were taken in this direction. However, the report emphasizes that as of August 2025, these efforts were still in very early stages, and the necessary resources for conducting a full macroeconomic assessment of climate risks had not yet been allocated.
On the positive side, the comptroller highlights that two specific goals previously identified as lagging in earlier reports have made progress. These include the establishment of a computational center within the Israel Meteorological Service, and the creation of a detailed, comprehensive climate risk database within the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Both initiatives are now in their final stages of implementation.
Severe Criticism of the Plan to Withdraw from the Paris Agreement
In its overall assessment, the State Comptroller finds that none of the findings raised in previous reports have been fully corrected, although some of the more targeted issues have been addressed to a large or partial extent.
However, the report notes that six years after Israel began systematically addressing climate policy, government activity in this field is still lagging and its performance is deficient.
The comptroller attributes this, among other factors, to a governance approach described as “piecemeal policymaking”—a strategy in which the government attempts to address challenges through a series of small, fragmented decisions that fail to provide a comprehensive response to the broader macro-level challenges posed by climate change.
In practice, the comptroller argues, alongside some limited achievements, the government still lacks the ability to properly assess the impacts of climate change and does not have structured plans or tools to address them.
The report concludes with an unequivocal warning that “the writing is on the wall”, and stresses that responsibility for this dangerous situation, and its potentially severe consequences, rests with the government, and specifically with the Minister for Environmental Protection.
The comptroller also issues sharp criticism of the minister’s consideration of withdrawing Israel from the Paris Agreement, the UN climate accord, warning of the serious implications such a move could entail.
“While Europe is experiencing the harshest summer in its history and the entire world is receiving a reminder of the severity of the climate crisis, the State Comptroller’s report shows that the Israeli government is ‘not in a hurry’ to prepare for climate change,” said former MK Dov Khenin, chair of the Climate Forum founded under the President’s initiative.
“This, despite the fact that Israel and the entire Middle East are expected to be affected by the climate crisis more severely than most countries in the world. Among other things, the comptroller points out that Israel does not even have a national climate adaptation plan. Elected officials must understand that this is a national strategic issue.”