Earth's average temperature for 2025-29 likely to exceed 1.5°C limit: WMO

WMO report predicts global temperatures to exceed 1.5°C, urging climate action to avoid severe impacts on ecosystems.

There is a 70% chance that the average global temperature for the 2025-2029 period will exceed pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5°C, according to a new report published by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) on Wednesday (May 28, 2025).

It also said that there is an 80% chance that at least one of the next five years will exceed 2024 as the warmest on record.

Besides being the hottest on record, 2024 was the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 baseline, the period before human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, began significantly impacting the climate.

The 1.5°C threshold is a target that countries agreed to at the Paris climate conference in 2015 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

A permanent breach of the 1.5-°C limit specified in the Paris Agreement refers to long-term warming over a 20 or 30-year period.

Countries are required to submit their next round of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) or national climate plans for the 2031-2035 period to the U.N. climate change office this year. The collective aim of these climate plans is to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C.

The WMO report said that the average global mean near-surface temperature for each year between 2025 and 2029 is expected to be between 1.2 and 1.9°C higher than it was between 1850 and 1900.