In 2025, greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities turned what should have been a cooler year into one of the hottest ever, fuelling more dangerous and frequent heatwaves, droughts, storms and wildfires, climate scientists said in an annual report.
Planet-heating emissions primarily caused by burning fossil fuels pushed temperatures this year to “extremely high” levels, worsening extreme weather with devastating consequences – especially for the world’s most vulnerable, concluded scientists working with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.
Despite the return of La Niña – a climate pattern linked to large-scale cooling of the Pacific Ocean, which can temporarily bring milder global temperatures – the EU monitoring service Copernicus has said 2025 is “virtually certain” to end as the second- or third-warmest year on record.
In its report released on Tuesday, the WWA research group found that climate change made 17 of the 22 extreme weather events it assessed this year more severe or more likely, while its remaining studies were inconclusive, mostly due to a lack of weather data from remote areas.
Ranging from heatwaves in South Sudan and Western Europe to extreme rainfall in Southeast Asia and wildfires in Los Angeles, those disasters killed thousands of people and displaced millions from their homes.
11 extra hot days since Paris Agreement
Theodore Keeping, a researcher at Imperial College London, said the catastrophic wildfires, record-breaking rainfall, unprecedented temperatures and devastating hurricanes seen in the last 12 months provide “undeniable evidence” of a rapidly changing global environment.
“We are living in the climate that scientists warned about a decade ago, when the Paris Agreement was signed,” he added.
Since the landmark accord was adopted in 2015, global average temperatures have risen by about 0.3C, and the world now experiences an average of 11 additional hot days each year, according to WWA’s research.
-
Nine of our best climate stories from 2025
This year, we reported on palm oil being passed off as ‘sustainable aviation fuel’, on creative accounting in climate finance and on African countries’ challenges using transition minerals to develop -
UN accepts overshooting 1.5C warming limit – at least temporarily – is “inevitable”
UN chief António Guterres says the world’s temperature will rise by more than 1.5C over pre-industrial levels but can be brought down
For the first time, global average temperatures over the last three years are on track to exceed 1.5C, the most ambitious goal governments agreed in Paris, according to the EU’s Copernicus service. The UK’s Met Office expects 2026 to be between 1.34C and 1.58C hotter than preindustrial levels.
“The continuous rise in greenhouse gas emissions has pushed our climate into a new, more extreme state, where even small increases in global temperatures now trigger disproportionately severe impacts,” said Sjoukje Philip, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). “We are entering a new era of climate extremes, where what was once an anomaly is quickly becoming the norm,” she added.
Silent-killer heatwaves
While heatwaves don’t leave a visible trail of destruction and often go underreported, the research group found they were the deadliest extreme weather event of 2025. One study estimated that climate change more than tripled the number of deaths caused by searing temperatures recorded across Europe this summer.
In South Sudan, extreme heat forced schools to close for two weeks in February 2025 after dozens of children collapsed with heatstroke. Human-made climate change made that heatwave 4C hotter and transformed an exceptionally rare event into a common one, now expected to happen every other year in South Sudan, a WWA assessment found.
Keeping of Imperial said the impacts are disproportionately shouldered by women and girls who predominantly work in sectors with high heat exposure such as agriculture and street-vending.
Flood risks rise as adaptation limits near
Floods were the disasters most studied by the WWA team in 2025, with devastating downpours made worse by climate change hitting Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the Mississippi River Valley in the US and Botswana.
In the Southern African nation, spells of extreme rainfall are becoming more frequent within a single year, while the rapid expansion of urban centres without adequate infrastructure upgrades makes them more susceptible to severe flooding, according to WWA.
The research group said this underscores the urgency of investing in measures to adapt to a warming world which can prevent many deaths and widespread destruction but remain critically underfunded.
However, the scientists also warned that even strong efforts to prepare for disasters cannot prevent all impacts, as climate change is already pushing millions close to the “limits of adaptation”.
“Jamaica was in a state of preparedness for Hurricane Melissa five days before landfall,” noted Keeping, “but when such an intense storm hits a small island nation in the Caribbean, even high levels of preparedness cannot prevent extreme losses and damages”.
Fossil fuel dependency is “costing lives”
Hurricane Melissa caused an estimated $8.8 billion in physical damage in Jamaica, equal to 41% of the country’s 2024 GDP, with only a small share of the losses expected to be covered by innovative insurance schemes.
In their report, WWA researchers said that drastically reducing fossil fuel emissions remains the key policy to prevent the worst climate impacts.
“Decision-makers must face the reality that their continued reliance on fossil fuels is costing lives, billions in economic losses, and causing irreversible damage to communities worldwide,” said Friederike Otto, WWA’s co-founder.
The post “New era of climate extremes” as global warming fuels devastating impacts in 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
“New era of climate extremes” as global warming fuels devastating impacts in 2025
A formal petition to the U.S. government calls for sanctions on Chinese seafood imports as it highlights China’s loophole-ridden illegal shark fin trade.
For migrant workers trapped onboard Chinese distant water fishing fleets, cutting the fins off sharks as they writhe violently on rusted decks in the Indian Ocean isn’t accidental. It’s an intentional and lucrative act that marks the start of a bloody half-a-billion-dollar offshore supply chain, tacitly supported by Beijing yet covertly concealed from port inspectors globally.
New data on international climate finance for 2023 and 2024 suggests that wealthy countries are highly unlikely to have met their pledge to double funding for adaptation in developing nations to around $40 billion a year by 2025 amid cuts to their overseas aid budgets.
At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, all countries agreed to “urge” developed nations to at least double their funding for adaptation in developing countries from 2019 levels of around $20 billion by 2025. Funding for adaptation has lagged behind money to help reduce emissions and remains the dark spot even as the data showed overall climate finance rose to a record $136.7 billion in 2024.
A United Nations Environment Programme report warned last year that wealthy nations were likely to miss the adaptation finance target and the data released on Thursday by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that in 2024 adaptation finance was just under $35 billion.
The OECD, an intergovernmental policy forum for wealthy countries, said the increase between 2022 and 2024 was “modest”, adding that meeting the doubling target would require “strong growth” of close to 20% in 2025.
More cuts likely
The OECD’s figures do not go up to 2025, but several nations announced cuts to climate finance last year. The most notable was the abandonment of US pledges to international climate funds by the new Trump administration but the UK, France, Germany and other wealthy European countries also pared back their contributions.
Joe Thwaites, international finance director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said developed countries were “not on track” to meet the adaptation funding goal.
Power Shift Africa director Mohamed Adow said adaptation finance is needed to expand flood defences, drought-resistant crops, early warning systems and resilient health services as the world warms, bringing more extreme weather and rising seas. “When that money fails to arrive, people lose homes, harvests and livelihoods – and in the worst cases, their lives,” he warned.
Imane Saidi, a senior researcher at the North Africa-based Imal Initiative, called the $35 billion in adaptation finance in 2024 “a drop in the ocean”, considering that the United Nations estimates the annual adaptation needs of developing countries at between $215 billion and $387 billion.
-
UN General Assembly backs “climate obligations” set by world’s top court
A UN resolution endorses a landmark climate ruling by the International Court of Justice that states should reduce fossil fuels and repair the damage from global warming -
Electrification emerges as COP31 priority
The Turkish COP31 President has called for “a truly global conversation” about shifting the global energy system from fossil fuels to electricity -
UK halves Green Climate Fund contribution, as it spends more on security
After promising £1.6 billion to the UN’s flagship climate fund in 2023, the UK government has now said it will only hand over half as much
If confirmed, a failure to meet the goal is likely to further strain relations between developed and developing countries within the UN climate process. A previous pledge to provide $100 billion a year of total climate finance by 2020 was only met two years late, a failure labelled “dismal” by the UAE’s COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber and many other Global South diplomats.
Missing that goal would also raise doubts about donor governments’ commitment to meeting their new post-2025 adaptation finance goal. At COP30 last year, governments agreed to urge developed countries to triple adaptation finance – without defining the baseline – by 2035.
African and other developing countries have pointed to lack of funding as a key flaw in ongoing attempts to set indicators to measure progress on adapting to climate change.
Speaking to climate ministers from around the world in Copenhagen on Wednesday, Turkish COP31 President Murat Kurum stressed the importance of climate finance. “It is easy to say we support global climate action,” he said, “but promises must be kept.”
He said the COP31 Presidency will use the new Global Implementation Accelerator and recommendations in the Baku-to-Belem roadmap, published last year, to scale up climate finance – and will hold donors accountable for their collective finance goals.
He noted that developed countries should this year submit their first reports showing how they will deliver their “fair share” of the new broader finance goal set at COP29 in 2024, to deliver $300 billion a year in climate finance by 2035. They are due to report on this once every two years.
Broader climate finance
The OECD data shows that the overall amount of climate finance – including funding for emissions cuts – provided by developed countries grew fast in 2023 before declining in 2024. In contrast, the amount of private finance developed countries say they “mobilised” increased in both 2023 and 2024, pushing the top-line figure to a record high.
While the OECD does not say which countries provided what amounts, data from the ODI Global think-tank suggests that the 2024 cuts to bilateral climate finance were spread broadly among wealthy nations.
Thwaites of NRDC welcomed the fact that overall climate finance provided and mobilised by developed countries exceeded $130 billion in both 2023 and 2024. He said that this was “well above earlier projections” and “shows that when rich countries work together, they can over-achieve on climate finance goals”.
But Sehr Raheja, programme officer at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, said these figures are “modest” when set against the new $300-billion goal.
“While the headline total figure of climate finance remains alright,” she said, “declining bilateral climate spending raises important questions about the predictability of high-quality, concessional public finance, which has consistently been a key demand of the Global South.”
She also lamented that loans continue to dominate public climate finance and that mobilised private finance is concentrated in middle-income countries and on emissions-reduction measures rather than adaptation projects. “Private capital continues to follow bankability rather than climate vulnerability or need,” she added.
Ritu Bharadwaj, climate finance and resilience researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, said the figures painted an outdated picture as climate finance has since declined as rich countries shrink their overseas aid budgets and increase spending on defence.
Last month, the OECD published figures showing that international aid – which includes climate finance – fell by nearly a quarter in 2025. The US was responsible for three-quarters of this decline. The OECD projects a further decline in 2026.
With Thursday’s climate finance report, the OECD is “publishing a victory lap for 2023 and 2024 at almost the same moment its own aid statistics show the funding base eroding underneath it,” Bharadwaj said.
The post New data shows rich nations likely missed 2025 goal to double adaptation finance appeared first on Climate Home News.
New data shows rich nations likely missed 2025 goal to double adaptation finance
The country’s most valuable utility didn’t like offshore wind. But a proposed merger with Dominion would include a $11.4 billion project in Coastal Virginia.
A utility megamerger announced this week would mean that the largest offshore wind project in the United States would be owned by the same company that already is the nation’s leading developer of renewables and battery storage.
NextEra Energy to Join the Offshore Wind Club, But Does It Matter?
-
Climate Change9 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases9 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy7 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Greenhouse Gases10 months ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测