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Climate change, intensified by human activity, made 2025 one of the three hottest years on record, scientists said.
For the first time, the three-year average temperature exceeded the 1.5C limit set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. Experts warn that remaining below this threshold is critical for preventing catastrophic environmental impacts and saving lives.
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The World Weather Attribution (WWA) analysis, released in Europe, followed a year of severe weather, including heat waves, wildfires, floods, and storms that affected populations globally.
Despite a La Nina pattern, which normally cools temperatures, 2025 saw persistently high heat attributed to continued fossil fuel use.
“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal of warming,” Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution and a climate scientist at Imperial College London told news agency Associated Press (AP).
“The science is increasingly clear.”
WWA researchers identified 157 of the year’s most severe extreme weather events, including those causing over 100 deaths, impacting more than half a region’s population, or prompting emergency declarations. Of these, 22 were closely analysed.
Among them, the WWA said were the world’s deadliest extreme weather events in 2025.
Some of the heat waves they studied in 2025 were 10 times more likely than they would have been a decade ago due to climate change, Otto added.
“The heat waves we have observed this year are quite common events in our climate today, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without human-induced climate change. It makes a huge difference.”
MILLIONS AT RISK
Other disasters included wildfires from prolonged drought in Greece and Turkey, deadly flooding in Mexico, Super Typhoon Fung-wong in the Philippines, and severe monsoon flooding and landslides in India.
The WWA said the increasingly frequent and severe extremes threatened the ability of millions of people across the globe to respond and adapt to those events with enough warning, time and resources, what the scientists call limits of adaptation.
Events like Hurricane Melissa demonstrated how quickly intensifying storms hinder effective forecasting and disaster response, overwhelming countries such as Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti.
Global efforts to address climate change struggled in 2025.
The United Nations climate talks in Brazil ended without a clear agreement to phase out fossil fuels. While new funding was pledged to help countries adapt, implementation will take time.
Many officials, scientists, and analysts now concede that the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming target will be exceeded, though some maintain that reversal is possible.
PROGRESS VARIES
China is rapidly increasing renewable energy deployment but continues to invest in coal. Europe’s frequent extreme weather has spurred climate action, but some countries cite economic growth concerns. In the United States, the Trump administration has shifted policies to support coal, oil, and gas over clean energy.
“The geopolitical weather is very cloudy this year with a lot of policymakers very clearly making policies for the interest of the fossil fuel industry rather than for the populations of their countries. And we have a huge amount of mis- and disinformation that people have to deal with,” Otto noted.
Andrew Kruczkiewicz, senior researcher at Columbia University Climate School, observed that places seeing disasters are ones that aren’t used to extreme events.
Kruczkiewicz called for new approaches to response and recovery, and underlined the urgent need for early warning systems.
“On a global scale, progress is being made,” he said. “But we must do more.”
– Ends
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