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Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee climate disasters last year, the United Nations said Wednesday, highlighting the urgent need for early warning systems covering the entire planet.
Poorer countries are severely affected by cyclones, droughts, wildfires and other disasters, according to the State of the Global Climate annual report by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the UN’s weather and climate agency.
The WMO said the record number of people fleeing climate disasters was based on figures from the International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), which has been collecting data on the subject since 2008.
In Mozambique, around 100,000 people were displaced by Cyclone Chido.
But wealthy countries were also hit, with the WMO pointing to the floods in the Spanish city of Valencia, which killed 224 people, and the devastating fires in Canada and the United States which forced more than 300,000 people to flee their homes in search of safety.
The 2015 Paris climate accords aimed to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — and to 1.5°C if possible.
The report said 2024 was the warmest year in the 175-year observational record, and the first calendar year over the 1.5°C threshold, with the global mean near-surface temperature 1.55°C above the 1850-1900 average, according to an analysis compiling the six major international datasets.
Record greenhouse gas levels helped bring temperatures to an all-time high in 2024, accelerating glacier and sea ice loss, raising sea levels and edging the world closer to a key warming threshold, the UN weather body said on Wednesday.
Annual average mean temperatures stood at 1.55 degrees Celsius (2.79 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels last year, surpassing the previous 2023 record by 0.1C, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in its annual climate report.
Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to strive to limit temperature increases to within 1.5C above the 1850-1900 average.
