Reacción a "Extreme weather events in 2025 pushed adaptation capacity to its limits"

The report is a new call to action from the scientific community for climate action, highlighting that in 2025 global warming once again had an unequivocal impact in the form of extreme weather events. The World Weather Attribution team includes leading experts in climate change attribution studies, which is a guarantee of quality.

A decade has passed since the signing of the Paris Agreement and, in this regard, it is a good approach to highlight how the planet has continued to warm since then, which has resulted in an increase in extreme weather events.

The report's conclusions are consistent with those of previous studies. There is evidence that anthropogenic climate change is causing an increase in adverse weather events across the planet. In Spain, various analyses carried out by the State Meteorological Agency show that heat waves are increasing in Spain by around three days per decade, which coincides with one of the findings of the global study.

It is important to highlight the main messages of the report:

• Every tenth of a degree of warming matters: since the signing of the Paris Agreement, the planet has warmed by 0.3 °C, a figure that may seem small, but which represents eleven more days of extreme heat per year than a decade ago.

• Adaptation to climate change is essential, given that it is already affecting us, but mitigation through a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is also essential, as this would prevent the worst effects associated with this phenomenon.

• The scientists who authored the report also believe that extreme weather events disproportionately affect marginalised communities and, within these communities, women in particular, due to the role they play in these communities. They also emphasise, and it is important to bear this in mind, that in less developed countries there is also marked inequality in terms of climate science, due to the lack of data in these areas.

The climate change attribution studies on which the report is based are highly complex, although the methodology has been peer-reviewed, which provides scientific guarantees. Basically, the method consists of identifying an extreme weather event, delimiting it spatially and temporally, and analysing the data (temperatures reached or accumulated precipitation, for example). Based on the results of the analysis, they calculate whether similar events have become more frequent and/or intense in recent decades.

In addition, they compare the data obtained with simulations carried out using advanced climate models, which recreate a planet that is 1.3 °C cooler. Based on the difference between the observations and the simulations, they try to determine the role that climate change plays in the increased frequency and intensity of adverse phenomena.

The conclusions are always statistical: ‘Climate change has made extreme heat waves such as the one experienced in Spain and Portugal in June 2017 ten times more likely’ is one example. In some cases, they have concluded that a particular episode would have been virtually impossible without climate change, i.e. on a planet that had not warmed by 1.3 °C.

The main limitations of this type of study are due to the lack of data in certain areas, both on the episode in question and, above all, on historical information that would allow an assessment of whether the frequency and intensity of similar phenomena has increased. It should also be borne in mind that simulations using climate models, although they are undergoing continuous improvement, are not an exact recreation of reality and, therefore, there are always uncertainties about the results that must be taken into account in a rigorous analysis.