Globally, 2024 was the warmest year on record, following on from the remarkable warmth of 2023. The last 10 years have been the warmest ten years on record. The annual average sea surface temperature over the non-polar ocean also reached a record high.

 Atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane continued to increase.

 Since the 1980s, Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average, making it the fastest-warming continent on Earth.

 Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe, and southern Europe is seeing widespread droughts. Glaciers in all European regions continue to melt. Changes in the pattern of precipitation, including an increase in the intensity of the most extreme events, have been observed. This can lead to increased flooding and likely contributed to some of the most catastrophic events seen in 2024.

April 2025

Rain records to fall in Queensland with Townsville to set new annual high

Meanwhile, Adelaide records driest period in decades and Perth swelters through temperatures above 35C

March 2025

In Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, people have watched the ice fields turn to exposed rock and experts predict these vital water sources could be lost in 30 years

February 2025

RECORD BREAKING

RECORD BREAKING

Earth shattered heat records in 2023 and 2024: is global warming speeding up?

Nature examines whether the temperature spike is a blip or an enduring — and concerning — trend. January 2025

Intolerable heat. Unsurvivable storms. Inescapable floods. 

In 2024, billions of people across the world faced climatic conditions that broke record after record, logging ever more highs for heat, floods, storms, fire and drought. As the year drew to a close, the conclusion was both blatant and bleak: 2024 was the hottest year since records began, according to European climate scientists.  "This is life now and it's not going to get easier. It's only going to get harder. That's what climate change means," said Andrew Pershing, chief programs officer at Climate Central, a U.S.-based non-profit climate advocacy group. 

The planet has moved a major step closer to warming more than 1.5C, new data shows, despite world leaders vowing a decade ago they would try to avoid this.

The European Copernicus climate service, one of the main global data providers, said on Friday that 2024 was the first calendar year to pass the symbolic threshold, as well as the world's hottest on record.

January 2025

It was the hottest year ever recorded for the world’s lands and oceans in 2024, US government scientists have confirmed, providing yet another measure of how the climate crisis is pushing humanity into temperatures we have previously never experienced.

Last year was the hottest in global temperature records stretching back to 1850, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa announced, with the worldwide average 1.46C (2.6F) warmer than the era prior to humans burning huge volumes of planet-heating fossil fuels

February 2025

Not yet a quarter of the way into this century and global average temperatures are already 1.75C above the preindustrial average. January 2025 was the hottest on record and has also set a record for the highest yearly minimum global surface temperature, and likely the highest minimum in the past 120,000 years. It is part of a clear pattern. Last year’s global average was 1.6C above the preindustrial – a sobering reality check, given that, only three months ago at the UN Cop29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, leaders were still declaring that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C was within reach.

April 2025

POLITICAL VIEW

This theme looks at access to food and a healthy and sustainable diet at the household level. People’s access to the food they want and need to live a healthy active life is at the forefront of the 1996 World Food Summit food security definition. The stability of food security at the household level is enabled by the systems covered in the other themes.

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