China’s national weather authority has published its annual climate assessment for 2026, concluding that global warming continued to intensify through 2025 across oceans, ice sheets and land. The report puts the 2025 global average surface temperature at roughly 1.4°C above pre-industrial levels, making it the third-warmest year since instrumental records began in 1850, and it identifies 2015–2025 as the warmest 11-year period on record. Ocean warming was described as accelerating sharply, with global sea level reaching a new satellite-era high, glaciers worldwide logging their second-strongest melt year on record, and Arctic sea ice falling to a record-low seasonal maximum extent.
Domestically, the report finds China’s temperatures rising faster than the global average — about 0.31°C per decade since 1961, with warming more pronounced in the north than the south. 2025 ranked among China’s two warmest years since 1901, including a new all-time high at Shanghai’sobservatory, whose records date back to 1873, alongside record warmth across eastern and central China. The assessment also points to more frequent extreme-weather events: heavier rainstorms, a record-breaking rainy season in northern China, and an unusually high share of typhoons making landfall — 11 of the 27 storms that formed over the northwest Pacific and South China Sea in 2025 struck the Chinese coast.
The report additionally notes record atmospheric concentrations of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide in 2024, continued glacial retreat and permafrost thinning on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, a 21st consecutive year of rising water levels at Qinghai Lake, and an ongoing “greening” trend in Chinese vegetation cover.
Carbon Market Context
- National climate assessments of this kind form part of the evidentiary backdrop against which China’s domestic climate and emissions-reduction policies, including its national emissions trading scheme, are formulated and justified.
Source