For the first time, the global average temperature over a three-year period has surpassed the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase limit, established by the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat climate change. This benchmark is measured against preindustrial levels.

According to experts, maintaining the Earth’s temperature below this limit is crucial to saving lives and averting significant environmental destruction worldwide.

Researchers attribute this concerning trend to the persistent use of fossil fuels—such as oil, gas, and coal—which release greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution and a climate scientist at Imperial College London, emphasized to The Associated Press, “If we don’t drastically reduce our fossil fuel consumption very soon, achieving this warming target will become increasingly difficult. The scientific evidence is becoming more definitive.”

Extreme weather events, fueled by climate change, result in thousands of fatalities and cause billions of dollars in damage each year.

WWA scientists identified 157 extreme weather events as most severe in 2025, meaning they met criteria such as causing more than 100 deaths, affecting more than half an area’s population or having a state of emergency declared.

Of those, they closely analysed 22.

That included dangerous heat waves, which the WWA said were the world’s deadliest extreme weather events in 2025.

The researchers said some of the heat waves they studied in 2025 were 10 times more likely than they would have been a decade ago due to climate change.

“The heat waves we have observed this year are quite common events in our climate today, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without human-induced climate change,” Otto said. “It makes a huge difference.”

Meanwhile, prolonged drought contributed to wildfires that scorched Greece and Turkey.

Torrential rains and flooding in Mexico killed dozens of people and left many more missing.

Super Typhoon Fung-wong slammed the Philippines, forcing more than a million people to evacuate. Monsoon rains battered India with floods and landslides.

The WWA said the increasingly frequent and severe extremes threatened the ability of millions of people across the globe to respond and adapt to those events with enough warning, time and resources, what the scientists call “limits of adaptation.”

The report pointed to Hurricane Melissa as an example: The storm intensified so quickly that it made forecasting and planning more difficult, and pummeled Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti so severely that it left the small island nations unable to respond to and handle its extreme losses and damage.

Global climate negotiations sputter out

Officials, scientists, and analysts have conceded that Earth’s warming will overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius, though some say reversing that trend remains possible.

Yet different nations are seeing varying levels of progress.

“The geopolitical weather is very cloudy this year with a lot of policymakers very clearly making policies for the interest of the fossil fuel industry rather than for the populations of their countries,” Otto said.

“And we have a huge amount of mis- and disinformation that people have to deal with.”

Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the Columbia University Climate School who wasn’t involved in the WWA work, said places are seeing disasters they aren’t used to, extreme events are intensifying faster and they are becoming more complex.

That requires earlier warnings and new approaches to response and recovery, he said.

“On a global scale, progress is being made,” he added, “but we must do more.”