The year 2025, which is about to end, will end as one of the hottest since records existed. According to the latest data from Copernicus, the European planet monitoring system, it is expected to be the second hottest on Earth after 2024 and tied with 2023. And higher average temperatures pose the risk that extreme events will be more intense and sometimes more frequent. This is precisely what happened in 2025, as Theodore Keeping, a researcher at Imperial College London, explains. “This global warming has made widespread heat waves hotter and longer, worsened drought conditions, and increased the likelihood of extreme fires,” says Keeping. The same thing happened with some episodes of extreme rain and flooding.
This researcher is part of the World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of scientists who carry out rapid studies on extreme phenomena with a high impact on the population in order to determine what role climate change has played in these episodes. In 2025, they investigated 22 such events in Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. In 17 cases, they determined they were “more severe or more likely due to climate change.” For the other five, WWA explains in its summary report for the year, the results were inconclusive, mainly due to the lack of weather data and the limitations of climate models. Among the events they analyzed and in which they spotted the imprint of global warming as an aggravating factor were the August fires in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, which coincided with a record heat wave.
This heat increases the conditions conducive to the outbreak of devastating fires, such as the wave of destructive fires that occurred a year ago in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. But beyond global warming, the scale of these disasters is also determined in many cases by other human factors, such as lack of preparation and urban planning. This is why WWA researchers emphasize the need to “invest in adaptation measures”. “Many deaths and other consequences could be avoided with rapid action,” they explain.
But, as Keeping also argues, “preparation and adaptation have limits.” An example is the destructive hurricane Melissawho, five days before his arrival in Jamaica in October, had put the entire Caribbean island on alert. “When such an intense storm hits a small island nation, such as Jamaica or other Caribbean islands, even a high level of preparedness cannot prevent extreme losses and damage,” adds this researcher. Adaptation alone is therefore not enough: “rapid reductions in emissions remain essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change”. “We urgently need to move away from fossil fuels,” warns Keeping.
Misinformation kills
“This year’s findings have been devastating, but they are also not surprising,” says Friederike Otto, professor of climate science also at Imperial College London and co-founder of WWA. And with each passing year, the evidence grows, in addition to the impacts of ever-increasing warming due to the burning of fossil fuels. Otto also points to the historic 2025 declaration of the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ), which established in July that countries are obliged to take measures to limit global warming.
But 2025 is also the year of confirmation of the rise of ultraconservative and populist movements, with Donald Trump at the helm, which have brought to the forefront the fight against climate change and the defense of the environment in general. “We’ve seen how climate change has become a culture war,” says Otto. “But whatever your political opinion, climate change harms you, your lives, your livelihoods and your economic prosperity. »
In this rise of these denialist movements, incorrect information plays a crucial role. “People believe this misinformation, and it not only has harmful effects on our global climate action, but also on the lives of these people,” warns Otto, citing as an example some disasters recorded this year in the United States. “A part of the population did not believe in climate change and therefore did not really take seriously the reality of evacuation requests coming from early warning systems,” recalls this researcher. “In some cases, they paid with their lives for believing incorrect information. »
heat waves
Of all extreme weather events, WWA explains that heat waves were the deadliest in 2025. It recalls that, although the majority of heat-related deaths are not yet well reflected in official statistics, one study estimates that this year, 24,400 people died from a single summer heat wave in Europe. Among the episodes studied by WWA this year were heat waves in South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Norway, Sweden, Mexico, Argentina and England, which were intensified by human-caused climate change.
“Tropical cyclones and storms have also been among the deadliest events of the year. One of the worst examples occurred recently, when several simultaneous storms hit Asia and Southeast Asia, killing more than 1,700 people and causing billions in damage,” the authors explain.
Beyond climate change which fuels all these events, researchers are interested in the capacities of each region to cope with these disasters. Keeping recalls that this year it has once again become clear how these impacts “unfairly” fall on the “world’s poorest and most vulnerable”, who are those who bear the least responsibility for this crisis. It is often women and children who suffer. “Women bear an unequal burden, for example due to their underrepresentation in management positions and their unpaid care responsibilities, which often increase their exposure to dangerously high temperatures,” the report gives as an example. And we add: “extreme heat further disrupts education, causing the closure of schools which reinforces inequalities between the sexes”.
In this distribution of consequences, the countries of the South are also the most affected. Not only because of the direct impacts when these disasters occur, but also during the preparation of scientific analyses. “Many of our studies in 2025 focused on heavy rains in the Global South, and we found time and time again that we were prevented from drawing confident conclusions due to gaps in observational data and reliance on climate models developed primarily for the Global North,” the authors explain. Having solid knowledge is also essential to be able to face and prepare for this crisis. “This uneven foundation of climate science reflects the broader injustices of the climate crisis,” the experts conclude in their report.
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