Asian hotspot

Mitigation and adaptation strategies must be accelerated

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The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has sounded a red alert in its latest "State of the Climate in Asia" report, indicating that the continent is warming twice as fast as the global land and ocean average. According to the report, the "mean anomaly" for 2024 in Asia was 1.04 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2000 average.

In 2024, average temperatures ranked as the warmest or second-warmest on record, depending on the dataset used (the WMO uses six datasets in its analysis).

From east to west, these findings would not come as a surprise to a range of Asians who suffered extreme weather events last year — North Indians weathering a severe heatwave, Keralites who lost their families in the Wayanad landslide induced by excessive rainfall, Indo-Chinese and Filipinos facing extensive damage from cyclones, Chinese farmers who lost crops to severe drought, Kazakhs and Russians forced to evacuate due to record-breaking rainfall and citizens of the United Arab Emirates who faced extreme precipitation.