If the 2025 climate year in Latin America and the Caribbean showed anything, it was that floodwaters can’t erase long-term drought, that temperatures will continue to soar past livable limits and that once-unprecedented storms are part of the region’s new climate reality.
A World Meteorological Organization report released Monday shows that Mexico alone experienced all those extremes at once. The country set a new national heat record in Mexicali last year, reaching 126.9 degrees Fahrenheit, and slogged through the rainiest June on record due to extreme rainfall in some areas, even as 85 percent of the country reported drought conditions.
The report described “hydrological whiplash” as a key challenge broadly across the 33-country region, spanning Puerto Rico to Patagonia and home to 660 million people. Droughts lengthen and downpours are rare but so intense that they cause massive floods and trigger landslides without refilling reservoirs or replenishing depleted soils. In the spring of 2025, floods affected more than 100,000 people in Peru and Ecuador, while Mexico City’s 22 million people faced a potentially acute water shortage.
The intensifying extremes are “unmistakable signs” of continuing climate change, along with glacier loss that threatens water supplies, to ocean acidification, sea level rise and rapidly intensifying tropical storms, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said Monday during an online press conference.
