Record Heat, Vanishing Ice: New Report Charts the Accelerating Climate Crisis Across Europe

“With rising temperatures, and widespread wildfires and drought, the evidence is unequivocal; climate change is not a future threat, it is our present reality,” said Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, one of the organizations behind the report.

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From the melting Arctic to the parched Mediterranean, Europe is being squeezed by a climate of extremes, according to a newly released report.

The latest edition of the yearly State of the Climate: Europe report, jointly released on Wednesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and the World Meteorological Organization, found that worsening climate change impacts continued to affect the continent in 2025, threatening not only lives but also the continent’s fragile ecosystems and biodiversity.

95% of Europe Saw Above-Average Temperatures

Datasets may vary slightly on 2025’s exact ranking due to different spatial coverages and methodologies, yet the conclusion remains the same: a staggering 95% of Europe saw temperatures climb above the historical average last year.

Northern European countries including the UK, Norway, and Iceland saw the warmest year on record. For Ireland, Sweden and Finland, 2025 was the second-warmest on record. Meanwhile, parts of southwestern Europe saw record summer heat.

Spain had its hottest summer since temperature records there began in 1961, as the country experienced a total of 33 days. The heatwaves, which also affected neighboring Portugal, fueled devastating wildfires across the Iberian Peninsula between July and August. Across Europe, wildfires burnt a record 1,034,550 hectares, according to the report.

Deadly Heat

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, warming twice as fast as the global average owing to human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.

Every year between 2000-2019, approximately 489,000 people died from extreme heat around the world. In Europe, heat-related mortality has already increased by around 30% in the past two decades, and experts say the continent could see three times as many heat-related deaths by the end of the century unless ambitious adaptation measures are implemented continent-wide.

A study by World Weather Attribution found that a record-breaking heatwave affecting cities in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, the UK, Greece, Croatia, and Hungary in late June and early July caused 2,300 deaths over a 10-day period. Of these, 1,500 – or 65% – would not have happened if climate change had not intensified the heatwave, researchers concluded.

Water Sources Under Immense Pressure

The annual sea surface temperature for the European ocean was the highest on record. For the Mediterranean, it was the second-highest. A record 86% of European seas were affected by marine heatwaves, of which 50% were classified as “strong”, 30% as “severe”, and 6% as “extreme”.

Ocean warming events such as marine heatwaves are set to increase as the climate crisis deteriorates, putting a greater strain on marine ecosystems such as corals, leading to ocean acidification and sea level rise, and altering ocean currents, resulting in massive die-offs of marine species and dead zones due to oxygen depletion. 

The rapid warming is also increasingly putting water sources under strain. In May, some 53% of Europe was affected by drought conditions, while water flows in 70% of the continent’s rivers were below average for 11 months of the year.

A recent study commissioned by non-profit WaterAid that looked at the world’s 100 most-populated cities and 12 other cities concluded that 44% of urban centers worldwide are getting drier. The Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona, France’s capital Paris and Germany’s capital Berlin were among the top-20 cities facing increasing dry extremes.

“The climate change signal remains unequivocal across Europe,” said Dušan Chrenek, Principal Adviser for Digital Green Transition at the Directorate-General for Climate Action, which leads the European Commission’s efforts to combat climate change at both the EU and international levels.

Vanishing Ice

Europe’s coldest regions – including the Arctic and the Alps – continued to warm in 2025, while the area of Europe experiencing winter days with freezing temperatures shrank. During a record-long heatwave in sub-Arctic Fennoscandia in July, temperatures exceeded 30C in areas close to and within the Arctic Circle, peaking at 34.9C in Frosta, Norway.

Above-average temperature, combined with below-average precipitation, led to a significant loss of snow and ice cover. Europe’s snow-covered area was the third-lowest since records began in 1983 – some 31% below average.

Glaciers’ mass declined as well. Iceland suffered its second-largest glacier mass loss in history, while the Greenland Ice Sheet hemorrhaged 139 gigatonnes of ice – a volume roughly 1.5 times greater than all the glaciers in the European Alps combined. This is not just an ecological tragedy; it is a human one. According to the report, every centimetre of sea-level rise triggered by this melt exposes an additional 6 million people to the devastating reality of coastal flooding.

Urgent Action Needed

The report called on European countries to double down on adaptation and mitigation efforts, while praising the EU’s commitment to legally binding targets to protect biodiversity and restore ecosystems at scale, including at least 20% of land and sea areas by 2030 and all ecosystems in need by 2050. 

The EU is also investing in renewable energy, which in 2025 supplied some 46.4% of electricity, with solar power reaching a new contribution record of 12.5%.

“[T]he pace of climate change demands more urgent action,” said Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at ECMWF. “With rising temperatures, and widespread wildfires and drought, the evidence is unequivocal; climate change is not a future threat, it is our present reality. In confronting the impact on biodiversity loss, we need to match the speed of adaptation happening in the clean energy transition and at the same time, ensure robust science continues to underpin our policies and decisions.”