On Crane Road, the infrastructure of the Las Vegas Café was devastated by Hurricane Melissa. In Black River, Jamaica, on November 2, 2025. NADÈGE MAZARS FOR LE MONDE
This year, the climate crisis once again offered no respite and spared no region of the world. Over just the last two weeks, Hurricane Melissa swept through the Caribbean, Typhoon Kalmaegi brought tragedy to the Philippines and torrential rains struck Vietnam. The year 2025, which continues an "alarming series of unprecedented temperatures," will rank as the second or third hottest year ever recorded, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported on Thursday, November 6.
The past 11 years (2015 to 2025) have been the hottest since records began 176 years ago and the last three years have been the warmest on record, according to the United Nations agency's annual State of the Global Climate report, published at the opening of the Leaders' Summit of the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. According to this preliminary data, between January and August, global temperatures were 1.42°C above the pre-industrial average.
Thus, 2025 is less warm than 2024; the latter was the first and only year to exceed the 1.5°C warming threshold, the most ambitious target of the Paris Agreement on climate change. "Warming El Niño conditions, which boosted global temperatures during 2023 and 2024, gave way to neutral/La Niña [a natural phenomenon that tends to cool the climate] conditions in 2025," the WMO explained.
