December 11, 2025 08:00 AM IST
First published on: Dec 11, 2025 at 08:00 AM IST
The world breached the Paris Climate Pact’s 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold last year, after coming perilously close to it in 2023. The global temperature in 2025 is virtually certain to be close to that of the past two years, according to Copernicus, the EU’s earth observation programme. This means that the three-year period from 2023 could be the first to exceed the 1.5 degrees warming limit. The EU observatory’s data has striking similarities with the World Meteorological Organisation’s (WMO) analysis, released in the run-up to COP 30. It estimated that the decade closing by the end of this year would be the warmest since the second half of the 19th century.
Scientists interpret the Paris temperature target as a 30-year average. So it would be wrong to conclude that the world has reached a point of no return from extreme weather events. However, several studies have sounded a red alert about the beginning of a climatic era in which global temperatures will be consistently close to 1.5 degrees. The warming flagged by Copernicus’s latest data is particularly worrying because, unlike 2023 and 2024, the world did not experience the heating effects of the El Niño in 2025. The pattern of the last two years persisted, despite the presence of a La Niña, which is usually known to have a cooling influence on global temperatures. The first month of the year was the warmest January on record. And, now, according to Copernicus data, the 1.5 degrees threshold was breached again in November.
At COP 30 in Belém, Brazil, two weeks ago, negotiators agreed to triple funds in the next 10 years, to make people resilient to the adverse effects of rising temperatures. However, securing funds and directing them towards the people who need them the most remains a challenge. Unlike global warming mitigation, which can happen at national, regional or global levels, building defences against floods, heat waves, storms and cyclones requires local -level action. Policymakers now have to join the dots between erratic weather, reports such as that of Copernicus, and what happens in climate conferences.