Monday 14 July 2025
Extremes of heat and rainfall are becoming the new normal in the UK, the Met Office has warned in its latest report looking at Britain's changing climate.
In its latest State of the Climate report, which covers the year 2024, it also confirms for the first time that sea level rise in the UK is higher than the global average, increasing risks of coastal flooding and erosion.
The report's lead author said the UK's climate "is now notably different to what it was just a few decades ago."
The report highlights how the trend of the UK's average temperature has been going up roughly 0.25C each year, with some cooler years mixed in, since the 1980s.
Responding to the report, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said Britain’s way of life is “under threat” from climate change.
He said: "Whether it is extreme heat, droughts, flooding, we can see it actually with our own eyes, that it’s already happening, and we need to act."
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The last three years have been in the UK's top five warmest on record, with 2024 being the warmest since records began in 1884.
The report comes as the UK comes to the end of its third heatwave of the year, with much of the country experiencing temperatures above 30C on Friday and over the weekend.
Amber and yellow heat health alerts, which have been in place across England, warning of the potential for a rise in deaths, particularly among those aged 65 and over or with health conditions, ended at 9am on Monday morning.
The report also examines how much of the change within the wider trends is caused by more extreme days during the peak of winter and summer, rather than a more gradual change across the entire year
When comparing the most recent decade, 2015-2024, to 1961-1990, the hottest summer days and coldest winter nights have warmed around twice as much as average summer days and winter nights have in some parts of the UK.
At the same time, the frequency of the coldest nights we experience has also dropped dramatically.
Met Office Climate Scientist and Lead Author of the State of the UK Climate report, Mike Kendon, said: “Every year that goes by is another upward step on the warming trajectory our climate is on.
"Observations show that our climate in the UK is now notably different to what it was just a few decades ago.
"We are now seeing records being broken very frequently as we see temperature and rainfall extremes being the most affected by our changing climate."
He also said the changes were not part of the "natural variation" of Earth's climate but were a result of greenhouse gas emissions.
The report also said the UK's natural environment is adapting to the warmer weather, particularly with spring starting sooner.
On average, there are two fewer weeks of morning frosts than there were between 1931-1990.
Records collected by volunteers showed that in 2024, frogspawn appeared and blackbird nesting happened the earliest since this kind of recording began in 1999.
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Increased rainfall to lead to more flooding
The report said rainfall was increasing, although this has much more variability.
For the most recent decade, the number of months where counties are recording monthly rainfall totals of at least twice the 1991-2020 monthly average has increased by over 50% compared to the number in 1961-1990.
The Met Office also noted that the increased rainfall falls almost entirely in the winter half of the year (October-March), with it up 16% in the last decade compared to 1961-1990.
It said this has often led to more flooding, noting the severe rainfall from recent storms, with October 2023 to March 2024 being the wettest winter half-year on record for England and Wales in over 250 years.
The Met Office did note that despite an increased threat of flooding from named storms, their analysis did not indicate the UK was becoming windier or stormier.
Miliband says UK’s way of life ‘under threat’ amid extremes of heat and rainfall
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said Britain’s way of life is “under threat” from climate change as the Met Office said extremes of heat and rainfall are becoming the norm.
The latest state of the UK climate report, published in the Royal Meteorological Society’s International Journal of Climatology, shows the impact of human-caused global warming on the UK’s weather, seas, people and wildlife.
From earlier spring events in nature to record warm periods in 2024, which have already been beaten again this year, Met Office experts say the UK’s climate is “notably different” from just a few decades ago.
Sea levels
The report details the climate in 2024, and over the longer term, highlighting how the UK has warmed at a rate of about 0.25C a decade and is now about 1.24C warmer than from 1961 to 1990.
For the first time, the report also found UK sea levels to be rising faster than the global average.
The Energy Secretary called the findings “a stark warning” to take action on climate and nature.
“Our British way of life is under threat,” Mr Miliband told the PA news agency.
“Whether it is extreme heat, droughts, flooding, we can see it actually with our own eyes, that it’s already happening, and we need to act.
“That’s why the Government has a central mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower and tackle the climate crisis.”
On those who oppose Labour’s green policies, he said: “(U)nless, we act on the cause of what is happening, the cause of what is changing our climate, then we will be betraying future generations.”
He spoke during a visit to a project restoring a rare alkaline fen at Hinksey Heights, Oxfordshire, with Environment Secretary Steve Reed, ahead of the report’s release.
Conservationists told the ministers how the fen, which is part of a national effort to expand the country’s best freshwater habitats, was helping to boost wetland biodiversity and sequester planet-heating carbon in the atmosphere.
Responding to the report, Mr Reed told PA it “lays absolutely bare the damaging impact of climate change on people living in this country”.
But he said that through projects like the fen, “we’re tackling the problem of nature loss and also we’re tackling the problem of climate change at the same time”.
Criticised
One year in, Labour has been fiercely criticised over its approach to the environment, including concerns around planning reforms sidelining nature in pursuit of growth.
The Environment Secretary defended the Government’s actions, pointing to boosting funding for sustainable farming and developing the nature restoration fund so that money from house builders goes towards more impactful landscape-scale projects.
“We’d become one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth,” he said. “This Government is calling time on that decline.”
Elsewhere, the report said that the last three years have been in the top five warmest on record for the UK.
Last year was the fourth warmest in records dating back to 1884, while the year had the warmest May and warmest spring on record – already beaten by 2025’s record hot spring.
But Mike Kendon, Met Office climate scientist and lead author of the report, said: “It’s the extremes of temperature and rainfall that is changing the most, and that’s of profound concern, and that’s going to continue in the future.”
The hottest summer days have warmed about twice as much as average summer days have in the past decade in some parts of the UK, according to new analysis in the report.
And as the UK’s climate warms, it is also getting wetter, with extremes of rainfall, floods and storms in 2024, as in recent years.
Wet winter
England and Wales had the wettest winter from October 2023 to March 2024 on record in more than 250 years, as floods hit Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, the West Midlands and eastern Scotland.
But while red warnings were issued for storm Isha in January and storm Darragh in December, observations do not currently suggest the UK is becoming stormier or windier.
Overall, however, the country’s weather is changing because of rising greenhouse gases pushing up global temperature, Mr Kendon said, with records being broken “very frequently”.
“Every year that goes by is another upward step on the warming trajectory our climate is on,” he said.
“Observations show that our climate in the UK is now notably different to what it was just a few decades ago.”
The report also said tide gauge records since the 1900s show sea level rise around the UK is speeding up, with two-thirds of the rise of that time taking place in just the last three decades.
Dr Svetlana Jevrejeva, from the National Oceanography Centre, said the UK’s coasts would start to see more events where rising sea levels combined with high tides would lead to coastal inundation, even without storms.
“This extra sea level rise contribution is leading to an increase in the frequency of extreme sea levels and an intensification of coastal hazards,” she said.
To highlight the impact of the UK’s warming climate on wildlife, the report drew on Nature’s Calendar, a volunteer-fed database of the natural signs of the changing seasons managed by the Woodland Trust.
Records for 2024 show that spring was earlier than average for 12 of the 13 spring events monitored, and the earliest in the data running back to 1999 for frogspawn appearing and blackbirds nesting.
The period of the year in which leaves were on trees from spring to autumn was also longer than average, mostly because of the earlier spring in 2024.
Chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, Professor Liz Bentley, said the report reinforced the “clear and urgent signals of our changing climate”.
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