‘This is our future,’ climate adviser warns as 2025 to break heat records

Rising temperatures in the UK will become “the new normal”, a leading government climate adviser has warned, as she called for more to be done to prepare for the impacts of climate change.

It comes as the Met Office revealed 2025 was on course to be the UK’s hottest year since records began, with climate change continuing to drive higher temperatures.

With just over a week still to go, the average UK air temperature across 2025 is on track to end up at about 10.05C, which would edge out the current record of 10.03C from 2022.

“This is our future, encapsulated in data,” Professor Rachel Kyte said.

A lack of rainfall and persistent warmth left the country vulnerable to droughts and wildfires through the spring and summer.

While temperatures vary naturally from year to year, scientists could not be clearer that human-caused climate change is driving the UK’s rapidly warming trend.

“The pollution [carbon dioxide] we’ve put in for the last 20-30 years is now what is driving this warmth, and so not curbing emissions well enough means we’re going to continue to see these kinds of impacts,” Prof Kyte, the UK’s special representative for climate, said.

She said the UK needed to become “resilient” to the inevitability of higher temperatures through further investment in nature and infrastructure.

“If we don’t invest in our adaptation now, it’s going to cost us way more,” she warned.

By the end of 2025, the UK’s 10 warmest years on record will all have taken place in the last two decades, in measurements going back to the late 1800s.

“Anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change is causing the warming in the UK as it’s causing the warming across the world,” said Amy Doherty, a climate scientist at the Met Office.

“What we have seen in the past 40 years, and what we’re going to continue to see, is more records broken, more extremely hot years […] so what was normal 10 years ago, 20 years ago, will become [relatively] cool in the future,” she said.

The Met Office’s projection uses observed temperatures up to 21 December and assumes that the remaining days of the year are 2C below the long-term December average, with slightly cooler conditions expected over Christmas.

So while the Met Office cannot say with certainty that 2025 will be the hottest year, it is the most likely outcome.

It would be the sixth time this century that the UK has set a new annual temperature record, following 2002, 2003, 2006, 2014 and 2022.

“The changes we are seeing are unprecedented in observational records back to the 19th Century,” said Mike Kendon, another climate scientist at the Met Office.

The expected new record of 2025 has been built on persistent heat through the spring and summer.

Those long, hot, sunny days may feel like a distant memory as we head towards Christmas, but both spring and summer were the UK’s warmest ever recorded.

Each month from March to August was more than 2C above the long-term average between 1961 and 1990.

Temperatures peaked at 35.8C – well below the highs of more than 40C seen in July 2022 – but hot spells happened repeatedly.

Four separate – albeit relatively short-lived – heatwaves were declared across much of the country.

The UK Health Security Agency also issued several heat-health alerts through the summer.

Mr Kendon said longer spells of hotter days and nights posed an increased risk to elderly and vulnerable people.

He told the Today programme it would also have an impact on the agriculture sector, influencing which crops farmers are able to grow in the UK.