Anna Cabré

In 2025, climate change drove extreme weather events around the world, disproportionately affecting vulnerable and marginalised communities. In addition, global temperatures were exceptionally high, heatwaves were significantly more intense than 10 years ago, and millions of people were pushed to the limits of their ability to adapt. These are the main conclusions of the 2025 report published by the World Weather Attribution initiative, whose experts believe that ‘drastically reducing fossil fuel emissions remains the key policy for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change’.

The year 2024 was the warmest year in Europe, with record temperatures in almost half of the continent, according to the European State of the Climate 2024, published by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The report highlights 2024 as one of the ten wettest years since 1950 and estimates that storms and floods affected 413,000 people in Europe and at least 335 people lost their lives.

Clear evidence of human-induced climate change reached new heights in 2024 and some of the consequences will be irreversible for hundreds or thousands of years, according to the World Meteorological Organisation's State of the Global Climate 2024 report. It also highlights the enormous economic and social impacts of extreme weather conditions.

Two papers published in Nature Climate Change analyse the possibility of exceeding the Paris Agreement targets of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures. Both papers suggest that having exceeded this warming threshold by 2024 could indicate that we have entered a period of several decades with average global warming of 1.5 °C. According to the authors, rigorous climate mitigation efforts are needed to keep the Paris Agreement targets within reach.

As announced, the new US president, Donald Trump, has signed on his first day in office an executive order for the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This is the second time Trump has withdrawn his country from the signatory states of the most important climate change agreement, as he did in 2020.

The year 2024 was the warmest year on record globally and the first calendar year in which the global average temperature exceeded its pre-industrial level by 1.5 °C, the Copernicus Climate Change Service has confirmed.  

Scientists in Hong Kong have studied the usefulness of six indices that estimate the severity and health hazard of a heatwave. Analysing several episodes in recent years in Spain, India and the United States, they conclude that five of the six were not able to capture their severity and spatial distribution effectively enough, especially in low humidity conditions. The most useful was the so-called "lethal heat stress index", but the researchers - publishing their results in the Cell group's journal Nexus - say that it too can be improved and that a more global framework is needed to mitigate dangerous heatwaves.  

An international group of researchers analyzed multiple data sets with current measurements and historical reconstructions. Their research concludes that, in the extratropical regions of the Northern Hemisphere (including Europe), the summer of 2023 was the warmest in 2,000 years. The authors published the results in the journal Nature. 

The Copernicus Climate Change Service, together with the World Meteorological Organisation, publishes the report on the state of Europe's climate in 2023. According to their findings, last year was one of the hottest on record, with a record number of extreme heat stress days and widespread flooding. According to their calculations, heat-related mortality has increased by 30 % over the last 20 years.

An attribution study by Climate Central concludes that from November 2022 to October 2023, global temperatures will set a new record, exceeding pre-industrial levels by more than 1.3°C above pre-industrial levels. This would be the warmest 12-month period on record to date. The analysis shows that during this period, 5.7 billion people were exposed to at least 30 days of above-average temperatures, including most of the Spanish population.