Already, 2026 is shaping up to be the world’s second-warmest year on record, according to some analyses.
For Europe, the past winter was one of the coldest in recent years, but temperatures are rebounding. Last month was the continent’s second-hottest March on record.
Wednesday’s report confirmed that 2025 marked Europe’s worst wildfire season on record, both in terms of the land burnt and the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the blazes.
Sea temperatures around Europe were the highest on record for the fourth consecutive year. Last year was also one of the three driest years since the early 1990s. Glaciers all across the continent lost mass, with the Greenland ice sheet shrinking by 139 gigatons — equivalent “to losing 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools every single hour,” according to Burgess.
Overall, Europe has warmed by around 2.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial era, with the continent heating significantly faster than the global average of 1.4 C due to factors including its geography and changing weather patterns, as well as cleaner air and decreasing snow cover reflecting less solar radiation back into space.
The report also found that the area in Europe experiencing winter days with freezing temperatures is declining due to climate change.
“The fact that Europe is warming twice as fast as other continents is worrying, and we need to act on this,” Dušan Chrenek, a senior official in the European Commission’s climate department, told reporters on Monday. “We need to drive transformational change to make Europe significantly better prepared for and more resilient to climate impacts.”