World's First Annual Report on Weather and Climate Extremes Puts 2025 Disasters in Historical Context

When a record heatwave scorches a city or floods swallow a town, the question always follows: was this climate change, or just bad weather? Answering that question rigorously has been one of the hardest challenges in climate science — because it requires stitching together event monitoring, long-term trends, regional detail and the physics of a warming atmosphere into a single picture. On October 16, 2026, the World Climate Research Programme took a major step toward exactly that, publishing the first-ever Annual Assessment of Weather and Climate Extremes.

Illustration: An AI-generated three-panel depiction of climate extremes — heatwave, flood, and storm. This is an illustration, not a real photo.

What Happened

The new report was released by WCRP's Regional Information for Society (RIfS) Global Extremes Platform — a network set up to translate cutting-edge climate science into information societies can actually use. It is formally cited as Schumacher, D. L., Alexander, L. V., Badi, W., Bettolli, M. L., Boisier, J. P., Engdaw, M. M., Min, S.-K., Pinto, I., Sun, Q., Teng, H., Thompson, V., & Trewin, B. (2026): "Annual assessment of Weather and Climate Extremes (AWCE): 2025 in context," WCRP Publication No. 04/2026.

According to the programme's announcement, the report offers "a new, integrated perspective" on the weather and climate extremes experienced in 2025. Rather than treating each disaster in isolation, it places individual events and extreme conditions in their longer-term historical context and examines them in the context of a changing climate. The assessment brings together six strands of science within a single coherent framework: extreme-event monitoring, long-term trend analysis, event attribution, regional assessments, physical drivers and dynamical mechanisms, and detailed case studies.

Background

The launch matters because extremes research has historically been fragmented. Meteorologists tracked individual events. Statisticians tracked trends. Attribution scientists — a relatively young discipline — estimated how much human-caused warming raised the odds of a given heatwave or flood. Policymakers, insurers and city planners, meanwhile, had to assemble these pieces themselves, often under time pressure after a disaster struck.

The RIfS Global Extremes Platform was created to close that gap: its mission is regional climate information designed for decision-making rather than academic curiosity alone. An annual assessment, published on a regular cycle, gives governments, businesses and the public a shared, authoritative baseline — a place where the question "how unusual was this?" can be answered with the full weight of the evidence rather than in the noise of the news cycle.

The timing is telling. 2025 delivered a punishing roster of extremes around the world, and the scientific community has spent the months since working through the data: what the thermometers and rain gauges recorded, how those records compare with the past, and what the changing climate contributed. The new report is the first attempt to fold all of that into one integrated annual product.

Illustration: An AI-generated depiction of climate scientists analyzing weather data, central to the new extremes assessment. This is an illustration, not a real photo.

Why It Matters

For the public, the assessment's biggest contribution may be conceptual: it treats extremes not as isolated acts of nature but as events with measurable context. A heatwave is not just "hot" — it is a specific number of degrees above a specific historical baseline, with a specific estimated contribution from greenhouse warming, occurring in a region with specific vulnerabilities. That framing is what turns disaster reporting into risk management.

For decision-makers, an annual, integrated product is arguably more useful than any single study. Infrastructure is built, insurance is priced and adaptation budgets are set on multi-year horizons; a yearly assessment that combines monitoring, attribution and regional analysis gives planners a consistent evidence base instead of a patchwork of papers. The inclusion of case studies and regional assessments is particularly significant for developing countries, where local impacts of global warming can differ sharply from global averages.

There is also a scientific signal in the format itself. By committing to an annual cycle, WCRP is betting that extremes assessment has matured from a collection of techniques into a discipline — one that can deliver, every year, a coherent account of how the year's weather fits into the longer story of a changing climate.

What Happens Next

• An annual series: This is the first edition; future reports are expected to build a year-on-year record, making long-term shifts in extremes easier to track.
• Adaptation planning: Governments and agencies can now fold the assessment's regional findings into disaster-preparedness and infrastructure decisions.
• Attribution advances: As methods improve, future editions should be able to say more, faster, about the climate fingerprint on individual events.
• Broader assessments: The findings will feed into national climate reports and, eventually, the next round of international scientific assessments.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Annual Assessment of Weather and Climate Extremes?
It is a new flagship annual report from the World Climate Research Programme's Regional Information for Society (RIfS) Global Extremes Platform, published October 16, 2026. It integrates event monitoring, trend analysis, event attribution, regional assessments and case studies into one framework.

What period does the first report cover?
The first edition assesses the weather and climate extremes experienced in 2025, placing them in longer-term historical context and examining them in the context of a changing climate.

What is "event attribution" in climate science?
Event attribution is the science of estimating how human-caused climate change altered the likelihood or intensity of a specific extreme weather event — for example, how much more likely a particular heatwave became because of greenhouse warming.

Who writes the report?
The 2026 edition is authored by Schumacher, Alexander, Badi, Bettolli, Boisier, Engdaw, Min, Pinto, Sun, Teng, Thompson and Trewin, and published as WCRP Publication No. 04/2026.

Why does an annual report matter?
A regular, integrated assessment gives governments, insurers and the public a shared, authoritative baseline for understanding extremes — turning fragmented studies into a consistent evidence base for adaptation and planning.

Illustration: An AI-generated depiction of Earth with swirling extreme weather patterns. This is an illustration, not a real photo.

Sources

• World Climate Research Programme — "Publication of the first Annual Assessment of Weather and Climate Extremes (AWCE) report of the RIfS Global Extremes Platform (GEP)" (October 16, 2026)
• Schumacher, D. L. et al. (2026) — "Annual assessment of Weather and Climate Extremes (AWCE): 2025 in context," WCRP Publication No: 04/2026