2025 likely to be UK’s hottest year on record, says Met Office

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

It comes as the Met Office said 2025 is on track to be the UK's hottest year on record as climate change continues to cause temperatures to rise.

With just over a week to go, the average UK temperature in 2025 is likely to be around 10.05C, beating the current 2022 record of 10.03C.

“This is our future embodied in data,” Professor Rachel Kyte told the BBC.

“Now the question is how are we going to prepare and increase our resilience to this?”

Lack of rainfall and constant warmth made the country vulnerable to droughts and forest fires in the spring and summer.

Although temperatures naturally vary from year to year, scientists cannot help but realize that man-made climate change is driving the UK's rapid warming trend.

“Pollution [carbon dioxide] What we have invested over the last 20 to 30 years is now causing this heat, and so not capping emissions enough means we will continue to see similar impacts,” said Professor Kyte, the UK's special climate envoy.

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

“If we don't invest in our adaptation now, it will cost us a lot more,” she warned.

By the end of 2025, the 10 warmest years in UK history will all have occurred in the last two decades, with measurements going back to the late 1800s.

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

“What we've seen over the last 40 years and what we're going to see next 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 told BBC News.

The Met Office forecast uses observed temperatures up to December 21 and expects the rest of the year to be 2 degrees below the long-term average for December, with slightly cooler weather expected for Christmas Day.

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

It will 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 the observational record going back to the 19th century,” said Mike Kendon, another climate scientist at the Met Office.

The expected new record for 2025 was achieved thanks to persistent heat during the spring and summer.

Those long, hot and sunny days may seem like a distant memory as we approach Christmas, but both spring And summer were the warmest in British history.

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

Temperatures peaked at 35.8C – well below the high of over 40C seen in July 2022 – but hot spells occurred repeatedly.

Four separate, albeit relatively short-lived, heat waves were declared across most of the country.

The UK's Health Safety Agency also issued several heat warnings over the summer.

Mr Kendon said extended periods of hot days and nights posed an increased risk to older and vulnerable people.

He told the Today program it will also have an impact on the farming sector, affecting what crops farmers in the UK can grow.

Spring and summer were also marked by little rainfall. The spring has been particularly dry – the sixth driest in the UK since 1836.

Combined with warm weather that tends to dry out soils, the lack of rainfall has pushed much of the country into drought.

It's officially summer drought was declared in several regions of England and Wales by the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales respectively.

Parts of eastern Scotland are also facing “significant water shortages,” according to the Scottish Environment Agency.

Recent rains have eased the situation across much of the country, and most areas are officially out of drought. However, water levels in some places are still below average.

“There are huge shortfalls that need to be made up, and this has huge implications not just for the people who work the land. [and] growing food, not our rivers, our aquifers, the availability of drinking water,” said Jess Neumann, associate professor of hydrology at the University of Reading.

Repeated fluctuations between drought and flooding have made it very difficult for communities to adapt to increasing extreme weather conditions, she said.

Prolonged dry and warm weather has created ideal conditions for wildfires.

By the end of April, the area of ​​Great Britain burned by forest fires had already reached new annual recordAccording to the Global Forest Fire Information System for 2012.

More than 47,100 hectares (471 sq km or 182 sq mi) were burned in 2025, beating the previous high of 28,100 hectares in 2019.

Andy Cole, chief fire officer at Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service, said firefighters in his region had responded to more than 1,000 bushfires this year – an “unprecedented” number he said.

“I've been doing this for over 20 years and we've seen a marked increase in the number of fires we have to fight outdoors,” he told the Today programme.

As the UK continues to warm up due to humanity's greenhouse gas emissions, scientists expect the UK to experience more extreme weather events.

“The conditions in which people will find themselves will continue to change, as they have over the past few years. [with] more bushfires, more droughts, more heat waves,” Dr Doherty said.

“But in the winter half of the year it will be even damper, so from October to March […] the rain that does fall will fall more intensely and in heavier downpours, causing the kind of flooding that we have seen this year as well,” she added.

The UK isn't the only one to experience extreme heat this year. The world is heading towards its second or third warmest year on record, according to the European Climate Service Copernicus.

But the international consensus on tackling climate change is also being tested, with the US and some other leading fossil fuel producers abandoning their net-zero emissions commitments.

Additional reporting by Justin Rowlatt, Kate Stevens and Zahra Fatima