The annual World Weather Attribution (WWA) report that analyzes the relationship between climate change and extreme events examines 22 phenomena that affected the planet in 2025, drawing “a bleak panorama” in the face of “increasing” risks that, it warns, are a consequence “not of a future threat, but of a current reality.”
The document recognizes that the year that is now ending was “slightly colder than 2024 globally” due to La Niña – the phenomenon that cools the surface waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean – which caused a drop in sea temperatures, but, even so, it was “much warmer than almost any other year on record.”
Greenhouse gas emissions, he says, “made global temperatures exceptionally high” and intensified prolonged heat waves, in addition to worsening drought conditions and forest fires, as well as increasing extreme rains and winds and severe flooding, with thousands of fatalities and millions of displaced people.
Raise the temperature
The study confirms that since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the average temperature has increased by 0.3 ºC, an “apparently small” increase, but which has caused extreme heat to be “significantly more frequent” by adding 11 additional hot days per year on average.
The policies contained in the Agreement, he adds, have contributed to reducing the expected warming from 4 ºC to 2.6 ºC, a “substantial decrease that would nevertheless create a dangerously hot world”, and insists that, “for the first time in history, the three-year average has exceeded the 1.5 ºC threshold”, fueling extreme weather events with “devastating” consequences.
The report notes that in 2025 these impacts were determined by specific local vulnerabilities, but. He adds, “in many cases we find the same patterns around the world,” which points to the need to “urgently move away from fossil fuels” and, furthermore, invest in adaptation measures.
Read: Climate change is already irreversible
Events like Hurricane Melissa, he exemplifies, reveal that when an intense storm hits small Caribbean islands like Jamaica, “not even relatively high levels of preparedness can prevent extreme loss and damage.”
Up to 157 phenomena
In 2025, the WWA counted a total of 157 phenomena, of which the most frequent were floods (49) and heat waves (49), followed by large storms (38), forest fires (11), droughts (7) and cold waves (3).
Of them, they studied 22 events in depth – 7 in America, 6 in Europe, 5 in Asia, 3 in Africa and 1 in Oceania – of which 17 showed “a clear imprint of climate change.”
“The heat waves, storms and heavy rain events we are seeing today are well above what natural variability could predict,” according to Sjoukje Philip of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who is among the analysts who produced the report and who insists that “what was once an anomaly is quickly becoming the norm.”
Heat and fires
Among the worst problems, the text highlights the “silent killers”, heat waves, which it considers to be the “deadliest” phenomena whose danger “is not reported or valued enough”, as shown by the data of the 24,400 people who lost their lives last year between June and August in 854 cities that represent 30% of the European population.
This extreme heat also affected American countries such as Mexico, Argentina or Brazil: in the latter case, large regions suffered one of the driest years on record, which directly impacted available water and therefore agricultural production, in addition to forest fires.
You may be interested in: Climate change reduces the size and survival of aquatic insects
The fires have been catastrophic in countries like South Korea – 2025 was the worst year in the Asian country since 1997 – and, in southern Europe, such as northwest Spain and Turkey and also Cyprus.
In the case of the Iberian Peninsula, it states that the extreme weather conditions conducive to these fires were 40 times more likely than they would have been without climate change.
Finally, the report points out the existing inequalities between the Global North and the South in scientific matters, since the lack of meteorological data and the limitations of climate models in the South (including Ibero-American countries) make attribution analyzes difficult by limiting the ability to accurately demonstrate the impact of climate change.
With information from EFE
Get inspired, discover and share. Follow us and find what you are looking for on our Instagram!
