State of the Global Climate 2025 highlights accelerating impacts and urgent need for action

The latest State of the Global Climate 2025 report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) presents a stark assessment of a climate system under increasing strain, with multiple indicators showing continued and accelerating change.

The report confirms that 2025 was among the three warmest years on record, continuing an unprecedented run in which the past 11 years (2015-2025) are the warmest ever observed. This sustained period of high temperatures reflects the ongoing influence of rising greenhouse gas concentrations, which reached record levels and continue to increase.

Ocean heat content also reached new highs, with the oceans absorbing the vast majority of excess heat trapped in the Earth system. This is a critical driver of climate impacts, contributing to sea level rise, marine ecosystem disruption and more intense weather events.

The report highlights that key climate indicators are all moving in the wrong direction. These include rising global temperatures, accelerating sea level rise, increasing ocean acidification, and continued loss of glaciers and sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Sea ice extent in both polar regions remains well below average, underlining the rapid pace of cryosphere change.

Beyond physical changes, the report emphasises growing societal impacts. Climate change is increasingly affecting food security, human health, displacement and economic stability, with extreme weather events becoming more frequent and severe. These impacts are linked to an intensifying energy imbalance in the Earth system, driven by greenhouse gas emissions and resulting in the accumulation of heat, most notably in the oceans.

The findings reinforce warnings that the global climate is approaching, and in some metrics temporarily exceeding, the 1.5°C threshold set under the Paris Agreement. While 2025 itself did not clearly exceed this limit, recent multi-year averages have surpassed it for the first time, highlighting how close the world is to breaching this critical benchmark.

The report underlines the urgency of scaling up action on both mitigation and adaptation. The continued degradation of natural systems, combined with increasing climate extremes, will have profound implications for biodiversity, ecosystem resilience and the delivery of nature-based solutions.

CIEEM continues to advocate for stronger integration of climate and nature policy, recognising that restoring ecosystems and reducing emissions must go hand in hand to address the climate and biodiversity crises.