Heat waves near the Arctic, a warmer Mediterranean Sea and wildfires and flooding across Europe were all part of the extreme year of 2025, providing evidence of how human activity is changing the continent’s climate, European scientists said in a report on Wednesday.
According to the report, at least 95 percent of Europe could have above average annual temperatures in 2025. Wildfires burned more than one million hectares of land, the highest on record. The mass of glaciers decreased and snow cover became less than average. According to scientific consensus, these are all the consequences of global warming, driven primarily by the burning of coal, oil and gas.
“Europe is the fastest-warming continent, and the impacts are already severe,” said Florian Pappenberger, director general of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which produces the annual European climate conditions Report with the World Meteorological Organization. More than 100 scientists contributed to the study.
According to the report, Europe has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world, with the average temperature on the continent rising by 0.56 degrees Celsius, nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit, over the past 30 years, compared with 0.27 degrees Celsius globally.
Europe’s proximity to the Arctic, the fastest-warming region on Earth, makes it more vulnerable, said Liz Bentley, head of Britain’s Royal Meteorological Society, who studied but did not contribute to the report.
“Every year we see more records broken and more extreme weather events as our climate continues to warm,” he wrote in an email. “Increased warming in the Arctic is of concern not only for the Arctic region but for the rest of the world.”
Temperatures in the Arctic have increased by 0.75 degrees Celsius over the past 30 years. According to the report, in 2025, the Greenland ice sheet lost more ice by volume than all the glaciers in the European Alps combined, and Iceland’s glaciers recorded their second-largest mass loss on record.
This will have profound consequences beyond the Arctic. Melting ice causes sea levels to rise and the planet also warms faster because less snow and ice means less sunlight reflected back into the atmosphere.
The report found that cold temperatures are also decreasing across the continent. In July, parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland experienced a record three-week heat wave. Separately, even inside the Arctic Circle, there were days when temperatures exceeded 30 degrees Celsius.
Rising temperatures affected many river valleys of the continent. Drought occurred in more than half of Europe in May. Nearly 70 percent of its rivers had below average annual flows, according to the report, and it was one of the three driest years for soil moisture since 1992.
The report found that European sea surface temperatures were the highest on record for the fourth consecutive year, with an “extreme” marine heat wave recorded in the Mediterranean Sea and “severe” in the Norwegian Sea.
“The report paints a grim picture,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “The pace of climate change demands more urgent action.”
