Europe records hottest March on record

Europe records hottest March on record as climate crisis deepens. The global heatwave continues: March this year broke all-time temperature records, extending a continuous warming streak that has lasted since last summer, according to the European climate monitor Copernicus.

• Europe records warmest start to spring ever

The Copernicus Climate Change Service has confirmed that March 2025 was the warmest March on record in Europe, by a considerable margin over the previous record. The heatwave has also caused extreme rainfall, affecting a continent that is warming faster than any other region on the globe. According to Copernicus, March was 0.26°C warmer than the previous record set in 2014.

• Global heat records unprecedented

Globally, March 2025 was the second warmest March on record in the Copernicus database, continuing a series of months that have been consistently more than 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels since July 2023. March was 1.6°C above the pre-industrial average, marking a major climate anomaly that is still being analysed by experts. "The fact that we are still 1.6°C above pre-industrial levels is truly remarkable," said Friederike Otto, a researcher at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.

She warned that humanity is facing a climate crisis caused by human activity, especially by burning fossil fuels that release huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

• Direct impact: extreme weather phenomena

Experts warn that every fraction of a degree increase contributes to the intensification and multiplication of extreme weather phenomena: heat waves, floods, droughts, storms and devastating cyclones. Warmer oceans cause increased evaporation, leading to increased humidity in the atmosphere, and this process fuels torrential rains and global climate imbalances, changing the precipitation regime and amplifying the crises already existing in certain regions.

The current crisis is not limited to temperature increases, but involves a chain effect on ecosystems, human health, agriculture and food security, against the backdrop of an increasingly unpredictable climate.