In 2025, the planet’s climate system is flashing red. Global temperatures from January to August averaged 1.42 °C above pre-industrial levels, making 2025 likely the second- or third-warmest year on record. Ocean heat content reached a new peak in 2024 and continues to rise, with over 90% of excess heat from global warming absorbed by the oceans. This has triggered the most extensive coral bleaching event ever recorded, affecting 84% of reef areas and accelerated the melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which are now at record-low mass levels. Sea-level rise has doubled since the 1990s, now averaging 4.1 mm per year.
These changes are not isolated. Climate impacts are increasingly cascading and compounding; extreme heat, floods, droughts, and wildfires are overlapping, amplifying damage across sectors. In July 2025, a flash flood in Texas killed 135 people overnight, a flood in Pakistan killed 700 people, while wildfires in California caused $250 billion in damage. Globally, climate-related disasters since 2000 have cost over $18.5 trillion. Biodiversity is also under siege, with more than 3,500 wild animal species now threatened by climate change, and coral reef ecosystems collapsing under heat and acidification.
Key strategies include integrated water resource management, nature-based coastal defences, climate-smart agriculture, adaptive fisheries governance, and universal early warning systems. Encouragingly, COP30 called for tripling adaptation finance by 2035 and adopted the Belém Adaptation Indicators to track progress. Yet 40% of countries still lack multi-hazard early warning systems, and adaptation finance remains underfunded, with only 13% of climate blended finance flows between 2019 and 2024 targeted at adaptation.
We are entering an era of climate polycrisis. But with scaled-up investment, nature-based solutions, and inclusive planning, we can still build resilience. We must know it takes a very short time for tipping points to become irreversible.
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Bapon (SHM) Fakhruddin, PhD 