The World Social Protection Report 2024-26 focuses on the climate crisis and the need to transition to a more sustainable world, and provides a global overview of progress made around the world since 2015 in extending social protection. The report identifies protection gaps and sets out key policy recommendations, including those for achieving the targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. For the first time, new trend data indicates that more than half of the world’s population are covered by social protection. But this welcome progress is dampened by the fact that 3.8 billion people are still entirely unprotected from life’s challenges and the impacts of climate change. Universal social protection systems have an important role to play in responding to the climate crisis and can help realise climate ambitions while facilitating a just transition to more sustainable societies. Greater investment in and expansion of social protection systems would support general climate mitigation and adaptation efforts and garner public support for climate policies. The report calls on policymakers, social partners and other stakeholders to accelerate their efforts to simultaneously close protection gaps and realize climate ambitions.