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This year will likely be the second or third warmest ever on record globally, as an “unprecedented streak” of high temperatures persists, UN scientists have warned.
It comes as climate talks involving world leaders get under way in Brazil.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Prince William will address other nations in the Amazonian city of Belem, including Brazil‘s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and officials from Jamaica, which is still reeling from the devastating Hurricane Melissa.
Global average surface temperatures in January to August 2025 were 1.42C above pre-industrial times, before humans started burning fossil fuels at scale, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation has said.
The level is closing in on the target set in the landmark Paris Agreement, struck at COP21 in 2015, which aimed to limit global warming to “well below” 2C and ideally 1.5C.
That means just 10 years later, it is already looking “virtually impossible” to stick to the Paris goal without at least temporarily overshooting it, the WMO said.
Under this heat, the UK experienced its hottest summer on record, two million people in Pakistan were evacuated from deadly floods and parts of the Amazon rainforest are so dry that once rare wildfires now spread easily.
Hilde Heine, president of the coral atoll country of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, said the “widespread mortality of coral reefs [is] now seemingly inevitable” and the Amazon is “likely not far behind in suffering a similar fate”.
WMO chief Celeste Saulo stressed it would be “still entirely possible and essential” to bring temperatures down to the 1.5C goal again.
That 1.5C limit is “not just a figure” but a “lifeline for Pacific communities and climate-vulnerable nations” grappling with…
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