Rabat – The world experienced its hottest 11 year-period on record from 2015-2025, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The WMO’s included energy imbalance in their report for the first time this year, broadening the ability to assess the rate of global warming through an analysis of more factors driving change.
“Sometimes independent graphs are not explaining the full narrative,” said Ko Barrett, deputy secretary-general of the WMO and a former U.S. climate official during the Biden administration.
“The energy imbalance gives you the full picture,” Karina Von Schuckmann, an author of the report and senior adviser at Mercator Ocean International, a French scientific oceanographic organization, said at a news briefing.
The earth’s energy imbalance reached its highest level in 65 years of record keeping in 2025.
The study reported record levels of three key greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide), which are trapping heat in the atmosphere, resulting in an offset to the balance of incoming and outgoing energy.
“There’s less outgoing energy due to the increased concentrations of greenhouse gases,” John Kennedy, WMO’s scientific officer, explained. “More energy coming in than going out means that energy is accumulating in the Earth’s system.”
A significant fraction of that energy – 90% – is going to the ocean which has been absorbing approximately 18 times the annual human energy use annually for the past two decades.
“This matters because over three billion people depend on these marine and coastal resources for their livelihoods. They’re living off the ocean, and nearly 11 per cent of the global population live on low-lying coasts directly exposed to coastal hazards,” Kennedy warned.
Geo-social climate inequality
This disproportionate impact points to another concern that countries contributing the least to climate change are often those facing its most severe consequences.
Morocco remains increasingly vulnerable to the threats of climate change, with its temperature rising 0.2°C per decade since the 1960s, 11% more than the global average.
The surplus of energy and heat being retained on earth raises the likelihood of increased frequency of intense weather events such as powerful storms, heat waves, droughts, and extreme rainfall.
At the same time, rising sea levels, and extreme changes in rainfall patterns can kill crops and livestock, exacerbating food insecurity and ultimately contributing to mass displacement.
Competition for scarce natural resources can contribute to violent conflicts, intensifying displacement in already vulnerable regions. In South Sudan, 2.3 million people had fled to neighboring countries amidst internal war and widespread starvation, with another 2.2 million internally displaced.
While climate change is not the preliminary cause of war, it spreads the seed of contributing factors.
In the Sahel region of West Africa, where at least 2.7 million are displaced and another 13.5 million are in need of humanitarian assistance, temperatures are also rising 1.5 times faster than global averages.
The UN Refugee Agency projects that by 2040, the number of countries facing severe climate-related hazards will rise from 3 to 65, including many refugee-hosting countries like Cameroon, Chad, South Sudan, Nigeria, Brazil, India and Iraq.
In 2024, approximately 90 million of the 123 forcibly displaced populations were living in countries with high-extreme exposure to climate-related threats, with an increase of five million in one year from 2023 numbers.
“Without dramatic action to mitigate climate change and significantly reduce the risk of climate disasters, by 2050, 200 million people will be in need of humanitarian assistance annually due to the effects of climate change,” the UN warned in the same report.
Without urgent and large-scale action to reduce emissions and strengthen resilience, the UN warns that by 2050, up to 200 million people could require humanitarian assistance each year due to climate-related impacts.
The WMO’s study also forewarned of an impending El Niño potentially escalating global weather patterns in the coming months, which could include extreme rainfall, heat waves, and tropical cyclones.