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It’s climate report card time in Massachusetts.
The Healey administration has published its annual assessment of the state’s progress in meeting its legally-binding clean energy and climate goals.
The results, which look at 2025, are mixed. There are some bright spots, like higher than expected heat pump installations. And there are some areas of concern, like weaker than expected electric vehicle adoption.
But the report shows progress is happening, even as the Trump administration makes it harder and more expensive for Massachusetts to do things like reduce planet-warming emissions, adapt to increased flooding and extreme heat, and permanently protect forests and farm lands.
“2025 has been a tough year for climate action,” said Katherine Antos, undersecretary of decarbonization and resilience at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. “Between the early termination of federal tax credits and the unlawful cancellation of grants, losing a federal partner has real impacts on Massachusetts, and it is delaying our progress in some key areas.”
Still, she added,  it’s not all bad news.
“Massachusetts is doing very well on the areas where we can control.” She cited the completion of a new high-voltage transmission line that brings clean energy from Canada into the commonwealth, and ongoing work to make sure that lower-income and minority communities don’t continue to be disproportionately burdened by energy infrastructure and pollution.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of how the state is doing in the six categories mentioned in the report card:
Fossil fuel-powered cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles are the single biggest source of climate pollution in Massachusetts, and the state’s primary plan for reducing these emissions is to replace internal combustion engine vehicles with electric ones
In 2025, people in the state purchased just over 27,000 electric vehicles. This brings the total number of EVs on the road to 166,296 — short of the state’s 200,000 EV target. The state attributes the slow-down in EV sales to the federal government, primarily its decision to scrap the $7,500 EV tax credit established under President Biden.
Looking forward, the Massachusetts Climate and Clean Energy plan calls for 900,000 EVs on the road by 2030.
Getting people to buy EVs requires a robust fleet of publicly available electric chargers. At the end of 2023, there were 6,767 public charging ports. Two years later, that number rose to 10,387.
While that does represent more than a 50% increase, the pace of installment is not fast enough. The state’s plans called for 12,000 public charging ports by the end of 2025, and 45,500 by 2030.
While Massachusetts can’t make up for the lost federal incentives for EV purchases, the state’s EV incentive program, MOR-EV, still exists. The Healey administration said it’s looking for ways to more effectively administer this program, and to encourage vehicle fleet owners to make the electric shift.
On the charging front, the state is doubling down on its commitment to build out the network with a $46 million investment. It’s also working to get more chargers along the highway with the money it received through the federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program.
The Healey administration also said it will continue investing in public transportation so fewer people have to rely on private cars to get around. According the report card, MBTA ridership was up 10% from October 2024 to October 2025.
Buildings may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about climate pollution, but the state’s reliance on natural gas and home heating oil makes housing the second biggest source of annual emissions.
To make buildings more climate friendly, the state’s plans call for more electric appliances like heat pumps, and improving energy efficiency with more insulation and better windows.
The climate report card shows Massachusetts is ahead of the game with annual heat pump installations. The state’s plans calls for converting 100,000 homes to heat pumps between 2020-2025, and Massachusetts ended last year with a total of 133,753 heat pump-heated homes.
But state data shows that only a small percentage of the people low-income residents opted for a heat pump in 2025, a fact almost certainly attributable to the high upfront cost to buy and install the systems. Of the 30,567 heat pump systems installed in 2025, just under 4,000 of them were in low-income households.
Mass Save, the state’s energy efficiency program, conducted at least 85,000 home energy audits and completed more than 50,000 residential “weatherization projects” — i.e., things that make a house more energy efficient like adding insulation, replacing old windows and installing more efficient appliances. That may sound like a lot of work, but it’s a bit less than the program did in 2024.
State officials said this year-over-year decline is temporary and is likely a result of some uncertainty early in the year as the state assessed the program’s new three-year plan.
Installing heat pumps and weatherizing buildings is expensive work, especially in older homes and apartment buildings. And there’s less help available to Massachusetts residents after Congress prematurely ended the home energy tax credits established under President Biden. The Healey administration said it can’t make up this gap, but it’s working to improve and streamline Mass Save to contain costs and expand its reach.
Last year also saw the roll out of a reduced seasonal heat pump rate on energy bills, which the administration hopes will incentivize more people to make the switch.
Finally, as outlined in the report card, the state is starting to track emissions from large buildings — think giant warehouses and skyscrapers — and plans to launch a new program this year to help them electrify. Though these structures only represent about 2% of the building stock in the state, they’re responsible for 40% of the sector’s annual emissions and energy use.
For Massachusetts to meet its legally binding mid-century climate goals, it needs more of its electricity to come from renewables like wind and solar, as well as other carbon-free sources like hydropower and nuclear. But after four years of a federal administration that backed these efforts, Massachusetts now finds itself facing a White House with a very different energy vision.
“ This is another area where you see the impact of federal actions,” said Antos of the state’s energy and environmental affairs department. “ But this is also an area where Massachusetts is absolutely pressing forward.”
Despite ongoing attacks on the offshore wind industry, Vineyard Wind, the state’s first large-scale offshore wind project, sent a lot of power to the grid last year. The remaining construction for the project should be completed next month.
The state also brought the New England Clean Energy transmission line online — a feat in and of itself, given the decade-long political battle over its construction.
More than 50% of the electricity consumed in Massachusetts now comes from carbon-free sources, up from about 48% two years ago. And with the addition of Vineyard Wind and the Clean Energy Connect, Antos projects it will be closer to 75% by the end of 2026.
Massachusetts’ clean energy plan calls for 3,600 megawatts of onshore and offshore wind power by 2025. The latest figures in the climate report card come from 2024, and show that the state had only 105 megawatts. Vineyard Wind, which can produce up to 800 megawatts, will add a large new source of wind power, though the state will still fall short of its goal.
As for solar, the climate plan calls for 4,470 megawatts of installed capacity by 2025. By the end of 2024, the state had 3,939 megawatts.
The Healey administration has said it’s committed to an “all of the above” energy strategy, which means its going hard on renewables, but also supports increasing natural gas supplies into the state to help meet growing power demands.
There is tremendous uncertainty in the offshore wind industry, and it’s not clear when Massachusetts might be able to bring a second large-scale project online. In the meantime, the state is looking north to Canada as a potential source of offshore wind power.
Massachusetts doesn’t expect to completely eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, so it’s relying on its forests, marshes and farm land to help suck carbon from the air and store it in the ground. To maximize this strategy, the state projects that it needs to permanently conserve a lot of its so-called “natural and working lands.”
In 2025, it met its target, despite losing significant federal funding to help it do so. According to the report card, more than 28% of the state — about 1.4 million acres — is permanently protected. The report card also shows progress in tree planting, which can have a variety of public health benefits beyond absorbing carbon dioxide.
Massachusetts has its work cut out for it when it comes to conservation, in large part because this work isn’t cheap and there are competing demands for undeveloped land. In 2025, Gov. Healey filed a bill known as the Mass Ready Act, which would authorize the state to spend more money on land conservation and related restoration work.
Steve Long of The Nature Conservancy said this legislation is a good start, but that the state also needs to provide more incentives for private landowners to permanently conserve forests. According to Long, 80% of the state’s forested land is privately owned.
It’s a lot easier to count the number of EVs on the road than it is to measure how the state’s doing when it comes to easing infrastructure and pollution burdens on low-income and minority communities.
But Antos from the state said the Healey administration is committed to finding ways to track its progress on environmental justice and equity, while also furthering those goals. To that end, the state is looking at where its grant money goes and the number of resiliency projects being done in collaboration with Tribal nations.
Another metric the state is looking at is “energy burden.” A household is said to be energy burdened when more than 6% of its total income goes to energy bills. In 2024, 48.9% of households in the state receiving food assistance — a proxy for low income — were energy burdened. The state is working to develop goals for reducing this  burden.
As the Trump administration rolled back funding and other support for all sorts of equity-related programs and projects in 2025, the report card spells out the ways the Healey administration tried to make progress on environmental justice. Some of these actions include efforts to lower utility bills, new guidelines for community involvement in project development and trying to get more people engaged in state processes.
Between drought, heat waves and flooding, the effects of climate change have already arrived in Massachusetts. It’s not enough to just reduce emissions, the state also needs to find way to adapt to the changing climate.
In 2025, the state made progress on several resilience efforts, such as supporting a growing number of cities and towns in drafting climate adaptation plans, despite losing funds from a key Federal Emergency Management Agency program.
“Without a question we are much worse off without the FEMA Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program,” said Julie Wormser, Cambridge’s Chief Climate Officer. “But we never could have even applied for these big federal grants if the state funding weren’t there to get us off the ground.”
Miriam Wasser is a reporter with WBUR's climate and environment team.
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