The Global Stocktake, a key component of the Paris Agreement’s ratchet mechanism, assesses global progress every five years with the goal of informing countries’ NDC updates. The analysis demonstrates how global progress across a range of sectoral emission indicators can be assessed using performance distributions to allow for a detailed and nuanced analysis without singling out individual countries. It demonstrates possible use cases, and present some initial insights, using trends in sectoral GHG emissions per capita. The display as a performance distribution can be used to understand the spread in changes across countries, to explore progress over time, and to demonstrate what rates of decarbonisation are possible.