The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released its 2025 State of the Climate report (March 2026) which reports on observed climate indicators and selected high-impact weather and climate events.
Human Level’s Take:
- The climate change headline: Earth continues to warm rapidly due to an energy imbalance where greenhouse gases trap heat, in 2024 reaching record levels in 800,000 years.
- The last three years are the warmest on record, and 2025 ranks among the top two or three warmest years, even with the slight cooling effect of La Niña. The vast majority - around 91% -of excess heat is absorbed by oceans, resulting in record ocean heat levels. Ocean acidification increases as CO₂ increases, killing off coral and disrupting biodiversity, food chains and coastal protection.
- Excess energy is also melting ice at a rapid pace, accelerating glacier loss and shrinking Arctic and Antarctic sea ice. As a result, sea levels are rising faster due to warming oceans and melting land ice, with rates increasing since 1993.
- These changes disrupt ecosystems and societies, contributing to food insecurity, displacement and climate risks - and these risks are only poised to grow as climate change intensifies.
- The WMO also explores the impacts of climate change and heat on health. Specifically, climate change is shifting the geography and seasonality of infectious diseases, with vector-borne illnesses - particularly dengue - expanding rapidly. The World Health Organization (WHO estimates) half the world's population is now at risk of dengue, with reported cases at record highs.
- Meanwhile, research from the ILO and WHO find that workers face acute exposure to heat stress, with over a third of the global workforce (1.2 billion people) at risk annually, especially in agriculture and construction, facing rising rates of fatigue, injury, dehydration and productivity loss.
- Though not covered in the report, climate change also has significant implications for companies, risking supply chain resilience, operational stability and worker well-being. In addition to the fundamental need to rapidly curb their GHG emissions, we will see more and more companies considering how to manage the effects of climate change and extreme weather on their business and their value chains.
- Our view? Human rights-respecting adaptation - done in a way that is fair and doesn’t leave behind vulnerable workers and communities - is set to become a table-stakes expectation of companies. Businesses can stay ahead by ensuring that their adaptation efforts take into account the ways that people could be negatively impacted, ranging from workers to consumers to local communities.
- This entails putting in place the needed protections for their workforce and supply chain, like heat stress management, protection from extreme weather, parametric insurance, inclusive regenerative agriculture, fair pricing policies, and other approaches to manage climate change’s effects.
Some key takeaways:
- 2025 was one of the warmest years on record: In 2024, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (CO₂, methane and nitrous oxide) reached their highest levels in recorded history, and all three continued rising into 2025. CO₂ in particular saw its largest annual increase since modern measurements began in 1957. Driven by growing concentrations of these gases, the past eleven years (2015–2025) are the eleven warmest on record, with the last three years forming the top three. While 2025 is marginally cooler than 2024 due to the shift from El Niño to La Niña, it still ranks as the second or third warmest year on record. The 2025 global mean near-surface temperature sat 1.43°C above pre-industrial levels. However, the warming seen at the surface and in the troposphere (the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere) only represents 1% of the excess energy trapped by greenhouse gases. Around 5% is stored terrestrially, increasing the temperature of land mass; and 3% warms and melts ice. Meanwhile, the majority of excess energy (91%) is absorbed by the ocean in the form of heat. Ocean heat saw a new record high in 2025 - the latest of nine consecutive years in which ocean heat has set a new record. The speed of ocean warming from 2005-2025 is more than twice that seen from 1960-2005. The ocean also absorbs around 29% of human CO₂ emissions, which helps buffer climate change but spurs ocean acidification.
- Declining ice, rising sea levels: Due to increased GHG emissions, ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland have lost significant mass since records began, and the amount of sea ice in the Arctic has decreased perennially since 1979. The annual maximum extent of sea ice in the Arctic in 2025 was the lowest or the second lowest in observational records, depending on the dataset. Sea ice in Antarctica has been at record lows for the past four years. The warming ocean and melting of ice from glaciers on land and ice sheets are contributing to the long-term rise in global mean sea level. The rate of global mean sea level rise has only increased since satellite measurements began in 1993. The rate of sea level rise since 2012 is higher than the rate from 1993 to 2011, demonstrating a distinct pattern of consistent sea level rise.
- Climate change is directly impact people and society at large: We are seeing increased high-impact weather and climate events (like floods, droughts, hurricanes, cyclones, wildfires and heat waves because of the changing climate. The WMO report cites research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which has concluded that not only is human-caused climate chance causing damage to nature and people, but that vulnerable communities bear a disproportionate burden of the harm. For example, extreme heat, drought and flooding are undermining agricultural systems and impacting food security. This has cascading effects on social stability and biosecurity, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Extreme weather is also resulting in more displacement, destroying homes, infrastructure and ecosystems that people depend on. The compounding effect of sequential disasters - especially where climate change intersects with conflict - is eroding communities' capacity to prepare, recover, and adapt. The WMO also explores the impacts of climate change and heat on health. Specifically, climate change is shifting the geography and seasonality of infectious diseases, with vector-borne illnesses - particularly dengue - expanding rapidly. The World Health Organization (WHO estimates) half the world's population is now at risk of dengue, with reported cases at record highs. Meanwhile, research from the ILO and WHO find that workers face acute exposure to heat stress, with over a third of the global workforce (1.2 billion people) at risk annually, especially in agriculture and construction, facing rising rates of fatigue, injury, dehydration and productivity loss.
