Global temperatures reached roughly 1.47°C above the pre-industrial average between January and September 2026, driven by a persistent streak of exceptional warmth and a rapidly developing El Niño event, UN News reported.
The World Meteorological Organization released its State of the Climate Update 2026 on Monday ahead of COP31 talks in Türkiye, detailing that the past 12 years have individually been the warmest on record. The global average surface temperature is projected to climb further through the end of the year as the warming effect of El Niño proliferates, with the phenomenon expected to become the strongest on record by December.
2026 is on track to be one of 4 warmest years on record, marked by exceptional global temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and a very strong El Niño that will unleash more heat & extreme weather into 2027. New WMO #StateOfClimate #COP31 Update ↪️ https://t.co/KCbuZ6IYmg pic.twitter.com/walJ7nZWh7
Extreme weather events marked the troubling progression of the year across multiple continents. In April, approximately 146.5 million people in India endured an extreme heatwave with temperatures reaching 47℃, UN News reported.
Provisional estimates show excess mortality across Europe exceeded 30,000 people over the summer, including roughly 16,000 excess deaths during the June 22–28 heatwave alone. Later in August, a Himalayan glacier collapsed, triggering a catastrophic downstream flash flood in Nepal that killed more than 1,300 people.
Oceans have absorbed roughly 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, placing 2026 on track to be the tenth consecutive year of record ocean warmth. Sea levels have climbed to the highest on record, and sea-surface temperatures broke monthly records throughout the year.
Meanwhile, glaciers continue a long-term retreat, having lost more than 400 gigatons of ice in 2025—an amount of melt that would have filled five Olympic swimming pools every second of that year.
“El Niño doesn’t add new heat to the planet. It releases heat from the ocean, which is the warmest ever measured. There is simply more heat available to release,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo stated, as reported by UN News.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the compounding crisis facing vulnerable regions. “We have entered a new age of climate extremes. A supersized El Niño is colliding with a planet already superheated by manmade climate change,” Guterres said, according to UN News. He added that climate records keep falling while human costs rise, urging leaders to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.
Greenhouse gas concentrations hit new records in 2025 and continued climbing into 2026. Carbon dioxide levels rose 53 percent since 1750, methane increased by 167 percent, and nitrous oxide grew by 26 percent. Freshwater availability also declined globally, with 42 percent of assessed areas recording below-normal levels in 2025.
Amid these compounding pressures, the World Health Organization has classified the expected health impacts of El Niño as a health emergency for the first time, while agricultural risks mount in regions dependent on rainfall. The final State of the Global Climate 2026 report is scheduled for release in March 2027.
