2025 was the third warmest year on record

Brussels, Jan. 14 - Planet Earth experienced its third-warmest year on record in 2025, extending a period of unprecedented heatwaves with no relief expected in 2026, US researchers and the European climate service Copernicus said Wednesday.

The other 11 years were the warmest on record, with 2024 taking first place and 2023 second, Copernicus and the California-based nonprofit research organization Berkeley Earth said. Global temperatures in the other three years exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius on average above pre-industrial levels for the first time, Copernicus said in its annual report. “The increase in warming observed between 2023 and 2025 was extreme and suggests an acceleration in the pace of global warming,” Berkeley Earth said in a separate report.

The landmark 2015 Paris Agreement commits the world to limiting warming to well below two degrees Celsius and pursuing efforts to keep it to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a long-term goal that scientists say would help avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

United Nations (UN) Director-General António Guterres warned in October that exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius is “inevitable,” but the world can limit the period of overshoot by cutting greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible. The Copernicus program said the 1.5°C limit “could be reached by the end of this decade – more than a decade earlier than previously thought.”

But efforts to limit global warming suffered another setback last week when President Donald Trump announced that the United States – the world’s second-biggest polluter after China – was withdrawing from a key UN climate treaty.

According to Berkeley Earth, about 770 million people experienced record-breaking annual temperatures in their home areas, with no record-breaking annual averages. Antarctica experienced its warmest year on record, while the Arctic had its second-warmest year, Copernicus said. An analysis of Copernicus data by AFP last month also found that Central Asia, the Sahel region and northern Europe experienced their warmest year on record in 2025.

WT.24