2025 is likely to be the hottest year ever in the UK, Met Office says

Prepare for a hot year

Professor Rachel Kyte told the BBC that “this is our future, encapsulated in data. Now the question is ‘how are we going to prepare ourselves and build our resilience to this?’”.

Earlier, Met Office revealed that climate change is continuing to drive higher temperatures and that 2025 was on course to be the UK’s hottest year on record.

The average air temperature in the UK across in 2025 is on track to end at around 10.05C, which his higher than 2022’s current record of 10.03C.

According to scientists, it is precisely the human-caused climate change that is making the UK rapidly warmer.

“The pollution [carbon dioxide] we've put in for the last 20-30 years is now what is driving this warmth, and so not curbing emissions well enough means we're going to continue to see these kinds of impacts,” according to Prof Kyte, the UK's special representative for climate.

Kyte says that through further investment in nature and infrastructure, the UK needed to become “resilient” to the inevitability of higher temperatures.

She warned that “if we don't invest in our adaptation now, it's going to cost us way more.”

By the end of this year, the 10 warmest years on record in the UK will all have taken place in the last two decades.

Amy Doherty, a climate scientist at the Met Office said that “anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change is causing the warming in the UK as it's causing the warming across the world.”

She told BBC News that “what we have seen in the past 40 years, and what we're going to continue to see, is more records broken, more extremely hot years […] so what was normal 10 years ago, 20 years ago, will become [relatively] cool in the future.”

The expected new record of 2025 is a result of the consistent heat that Brits experienced through the spring and summer.

If 2025 ends up being the hottest year, it would be the sixth time this century that the UK has set a new annual temperature record, following 2002, 2003, 2006, 2014 and 2022.