When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024

The document reports that human-induced warming of 1.3°C contributed to record-breaking temperatures, floods, and droughts in 2024, resulting in thousands of deaths and millions of displacements. It highlights that climate change added an average of 41 dangerous heat days globally and often overrode natural phenomena like El Niño. The report calls for a rapid transition from fossil fuels, improved early warning systems, real-time heat death reporting, and increased finance for developing countries to support adaptation.

• Climate change contributed to at least 3,700 deaths and the displacement of millions across 26 studied weather events in 2024, though these represent only a small portion of the 219 events that met the organization's trigger criteria.
• New analysis indicates that climate change added an average of 41 additional days of dangerous heat globally in 2024, with the highest number of these days occurring in small island and developing states.
• Climate change played a more significant role than El Niño in fueling 2024's extreme events, including the historic drought in the Amazon, suggesting that human-induced warming is increasingly overriding natural weather phenomena.
• Of the 16 floods studied in the past 12 months, 15 were driven by climate change-amplified rainfall, with devastating events occurring in locations such as Kathmandu, Dubai, Rio Grande do Sul, and the Southern Appalachians.
• Climate change has increased the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes and the risk of multiple high-category typhoons in the Philippines; specifically, 30 of 38 Atlantic hurricanes analyzed between 2019 and 2023 had wind speeds one category higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale than they would have been without human-caused warming.

APA

World Weather Attribution (2024). When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024. https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/when-risks-become-reality-extreme-weather-in-2024/

Chicago

World Weather Attribution. When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024. 2024. https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/when-risks-become-reality-extreme-weather-in-2024/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Weather Attribution |title=When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024 |date=27 December 2024 |url=https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/when-risks-become-reality-extreme-weather-in-2024/ |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldweatherattribution2024when, author = {{World Weather Attribution}}, title = {{When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024}}, institution = {World Weather Attribution}, year = {2024}, month = dec, url = {https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/when-risks-become-reality-extreme-weather-in-2024/}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }