Anna Cabré

The latest forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) suggest that there is a likelihood that the phenomenon known as El Niño will return this year and that it will do so with greater intensity. In Europe, for June through August, the forecast indicates a slight tendency toward below-average precipitation in the northeast of the continent. As for the Iberian Peninsula, temperatures are expected to exceed the top quintile of the seasonal average. Although it is not yet certain that this will occur, forecasts for the coming months will either confirm or rule it out.

Physical inactivity driven by rising temperatures due to climate change could result in between 0.47 and 0.70 million additional premature deaths each year by 2050, according to projections from a new study published in The Lancet Global Health. The study analysed data on the relationship between temperature and physical inactivity across 156 countries between 2000 and 2022. Low- and middle-income countries, where access to air conditioning, the availability of shaded public infrastructure, and discretionary leisure time are limited, were the most affected. Spain is among the European countries expected to be most impacted.

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.