The Earth’s climate is in a “state of emergency”, according to the United Nations which has warned it is more out of balance than at any other time in observed history.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), which is the UN’s weather agency, predicted that rapid and large-scale changes to the global climate in recent decades would trigger harmful repercussions lasting centuries.
It comes as rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere drive global warming and melt ice.
The WMO’s annual “state of the global climate” report, released on Monday, also highlighted the impact in 2025 of intense heatwaves, heavy rainfall, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms, and flooding, including widespread death and vast economic losses.
It further demonstrated the cascading impacts that extreme weather events were having worldwide, including food insecurity and displacement, and health risks driven by shifting rainfall patterns, like mosquito-borne dengue disease and heat stress.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres warned the global climate is in a “state of emergency”.
“Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits,” he said. “Every key climate indicator is flashing red.”
The report confirmed that 2015 to 2025 represented the hottest 11 years on record, with data showing last year as the second or third hottest ever documented.
It also revealed that Earth is close to breaching the key warming threshold of 1.5C – beyond which increasingly severe and compounding climate impacts are triggered – with the figure recorded at 1.43C last year.
