Almost every European country experienced a hotter winter than usual, study finds
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When disaster strikes, it becomes painfully obvious how much human-caused climate change is making our world a more dangerous place.
In recent months, attribution studies have found that it doubled the likelihood of Central Europe's
deadly floods
in September, and made the hot, dry weather that drove January's
LA wildfires
35 per cent more likely. The heatwave that left students fainting in
South Sudan
last month was ten times more likely to occur in our era of fossil fuel burning.
However, less notice is paid to the way climate change is shifting our local climates on a daily basis. A new analysis shows that at least one in five people globally felt a strong climate change influence every day over the last three months, from December 2024 to February 2025.
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Extreme heat was the most pervasive climate change effect around the world this winter, according to scientists at Climate Central, the independent group behind the
study
.
According to the group's Climate Change Index, a 'strong' influence is felt when climate change makes conditions at least two times more likely.
Heat-related health risks rose for billions of people
Nearly 394 million people experienced 30 or more days of risky heat added by climate change during the last three months, the scientists say.
Most of these 394 million people (74 per cent) live in Africa.
Risky heat days are defined as those with temperatures hotter than 90 per cent of the temperatures recorded in the local area from 1991-2020.
Heat-related health risks
rise when temperatures climb above this local threshold, partly because people are unprepared.
In half of the analysed countries (110 out of 220), the average person experienced temperatures strongly influenced by climate change for at least one-third of the season (30 days or more).
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Where in Europe felt the biggest rise in temperatures?
The last three months were warmer than normal for 42 out of 43 countries in Europe, according to Climate Central.
Russia
, home to more than 145 million people, experienced the highest average temperature anomaly of 3.1°C above the 1991-2020 normal. Baltic countries were close behind, with Lithuania and Latvia recording temperatures of 2.8°C higher than normal, followed by Estonia at 2.7°C.
During this time, more than 9.4 million people across four countries experienced daily average temperatures that were strongly influenced by climate change for at least one-third of the season.
Malta
experienced the most abnormally hot days (34), just ahead of Norway and Estonia (both 32) and Latvia (31).
At a city level, Longyearbyen in
Svalbard
is well ahead of the pack. The Norwegian territory's 1,753-strong population experienced 45 days of unusual heat made twice as likely by climate change.
The other top 10 cities with the highest average temperature anomalies were all in Eastern Europe. They were, in order: Vilnius (Lithuania), Minsk (Belarus), Tallinn (Estonia), Riga (Latvia), Helsinki (Finland), Kharkiv (
Ukraine
), Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Kyiv (Ukraine) and Chisinau (Moldova).
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