BRUSSELS — Europe saw one of its warmest years on record in 2025, scientists found in a report published Wednesday, as the world braces for a major El Niño event likely to send global temperatures soaring even higher.
Intense heat waves swept Europe on land and sea last year, as countries suffered record wildfires, significant glacier shrinkage and widespread drought, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and EU scientists said in their annual assessment of the continent’s climate.
The continent saw its hottest year on record, according to WMO data, which includes Greenland and the Caucasus as part of Europe. The EU’s Copernicus observation program, which excludes those territories, marked 2025 down as the second- or third-hottest year ever.
Depending on the dataset used, up to 99 percent of Europe saw higher-than-normal temperatures last year, the report found. That marked “the first time that almost the entire continent saw above-average annual temperatures,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus’ climate change service.
The findings come as the WMO and other organizations are expecting an El Niño — a naturally occurring climate pattern that tends to intensify the effects of human-caused global warming — to develop later in the year, likely driving up temperatures across the world into 2027.
“If you remember, 2024 was the warmest year on record, and that was because of El Niño,” Celeste Saulo, WMO secretary-general, told reporters Monday, while caveating that “we would like to wait until May to see whether this El Niño evolves into a stronger El Niño.”
Both the WMO and the United Kingdom’s Met Office have said they expect this El Niño to be unusually strong, sometimes dubbed a “super” El Niño.
“Scientists are telling us that this could be the strongest El Niño event so far this century,” Grahame Madge, a Met Office spokesperson, said earlier this month.
Each El Niño year has unique effects, intensifying rainfall or droughts in different parts of the world. But they generally push up global temperatures, with the maximum impact typically felt the following year.
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.”
