By the end of 2025, warming in all regions of the world reached 90 to 94 per cent of the levels expected in a 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter world, new research reveals.
Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the research provides the most comprehensive assessment of regional warming across global land areas since pre-industrial times, and new insights into how warming is unfolding across varied parts of the world.
“Our results reveal that current warming is already indistinguishable from that of a 1.5 C world even on regional scale, highlighting the shared urgency of adaptation across all regions,” said author Tong Li from the University of Victoria’s Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium in Canada.
The Paris Agreement, adopted by nearly 200 countries in 2015, aims to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.
The study comes as world leaders, policymakers and researchers gather for the United Nations climate change conference, or COP31, in Antalya, Turkiye, beginning Monday.
“Many of the climate risks associated with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming are no longer a future concern; they are already being experienced around the world,” Francis Zwiers, a statistician and scientist emeritus at the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, said.
“Very importantly, we’re providing information that policy-makers and decision-makers in the individual regions will be able to use to quantify the extent to which their regions are being affected,” Zwiers said.
The study found that human influence on the climate had led to a global land average temperature that was already 1.9 degrees Celsius above its pre-industrial level.
Land areas warm faster than oceans, particularly at high northern latitudes. As a result, ocean-influenced regions such as southern South America, Southeast Asia and New Zealand warmed less than northern land regions, including the Arctic areas of Russia and North America, where temperatures have risen more rapidly than tropical regions such as much of Africa, the researchers said.
For example, warming in northwestern North America was already at 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, compared with 1.7 degrees Celsius in northern central America, which includes Mexico, while Canada was 2.2 degrees Celsius warmer during the past decade than during the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period.
“What is less well understood is that 1.5 C of global warming does not translate to the same amount of warming everywhere. Communities in many parts of the world are already facing much higher levels of warming and associated impacts,” Xuebin Zhang, climate scientist and director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, said.
Despite differences, all regions identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are estimated to reach their 1.5 degrees Celsius equivalent warming levels at about the same time, around 2029.
“Regional warming is already pronounced. By 2025, attributed regional warming had reached about 90-94 per cent of the levels expected at 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming and 65-76 per cent of those expected at 2 degrees Celsius,” the authors wrote.
“… current warming is already indistinguishable from a 1.5 degrees Celsius world, highlighting the shared urgency of adaptation across all regions,” they said.
