Fossil fuel emissions continued to rise in 2025, fueling global temperatures and increasingly destructive extreme weather events worldwide.

The year ending was slightly cooler than the previous year, 2024, globally, but much hotter than almost any other year on record.

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Some of the worst extreme weather events of 2025, studied by the World Weather Attribution academic collaboration, document the severe consequences of a warmer climate.

Across the 22 extreme events analyzed, heat waves, floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires claimed lives, destroyed communities, and ravaged crops, demonstrating significant damage from ongoing anthropogenic climate change.

Even in a year with weak La Niña conditions, which resulted in lower sea surface temperatures, global temperatures remained very high.

World Weather Attribution turns 10 today 🎉

To mark the occasion, we’ve launched our study tracker – an interactive tool to explore our analyses on extreme weather events around the world. https://t.co/9fDxnl3OMa pic.twitter.com/07fbclETaN

— World Weather Attribution (@WWAttribution) October 31, 2024

Extreme weather events continued to occur this year at alarming levels.

Although natural climate variability patterns, such as El Niño, were in a cooler phase, greenhouse gas emissions from human activity caused exceptionally high global temperatures, intensifying prolonged heat waves and worsening droughts, creating conditions ripe for wildfires.

Rainfall and extreme winds associated with severe storms and floods also increased, causing thousands of deaths and displacing millions of people in several regions.

These events highlight the growing risks of anthropogenic global warming of approximately 1.3 degrees Celsius, and all of this reinforces the urgent need to accelerate the phasing out of fossil fuels.

Since 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, global warming has increased by 0.3 degrees, a seemingly small rise that has significantly increased the frequency of extreme heat and added an average of 11 extra hot days per year.

If the Paris Agreement is fully implemented, it would help reduce projected warming from 4.0 degrees to 2.6 degrees Celsius—a substantial decrease that would nonetheless create a dangerously hot world.

A review of recent heat waves, such as the extreme heat in the Amazon or in Burkina Faso and Mali, shows that these events are almost 10 times more likely than in 2015.

Tens of thousands of displaced families in #Gaza — many sheltering in tents and overcrowded schools — face rain, flooding, and deteriorating living conditions.

As winter deepens the hardship, UNRWA teams continue working to support people wherever they are.#UNRWAworks pic.twitter.com/KbhQAO4tRg

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) December 22, 2025

Moreover, this year highlighted, once again, the unfair distribution of the consequences of climate change, and while humanity urgently needs to move away from fossil fuels, it must also invest in adaptation measures. Many deaths and other impacts could be avoided with timely action, but events like Hurricane Melissa underscored the limitations of preparedness and adaptation in preventing extreme loss and damage.

This underscores that adaptation alone is not enough; a rapid reduction in emissions remains essential to avoid the worst impacts of human-caused climate change.

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