KNMI 2025 climate report: the Netherlands’ ten warmest years are all in the 21st century

The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) has released its fifth State of our Climate report, painting a picture of a warm, very sunny and dry 2025 for the Netherlands against a backdrop of accelerating global change. The year was the sixth warmest on record in De Bilt, and the second sunniest since measurements began, while globally the average temperature reached roughly 1.4°C above late-nineteenth-century levels. The report underlines that all ten warmest years in the Dutch temperature record now fall in this century, with seven of them in the last decade, confirming that the country is warming almost twice as fast as the world as a whole.

For the Netherlands, 2025 combined heat and sunshine with a pronounced lack of rainfall. Average annual temperature reached 11.4°C, about 0.9°C above the 1991–2020 norm, while national rainfall totalled just 673 millimetres compared with a climatological average of 851 millimetres. Spring was exceptional: near-record sunshine, record numbers of mild days and the second-lowest spring rainfall on record produced a large soil-moisture deficit, with the province of Zeeland experiencing more than twice the summer-half-year deficit of  the province of Groningen. The KNMI graphics show 2025 entering the top ten driest years for summer moisture deficit, despite relatively few severe warning days. Such conditions heighten risk for agriculture, nature, drinking-water supply, inland shipping and soil subsidence.

Beyond the Netherlands, 2025 was the third-warmest year on record for Europe, with only 2020 and 2024 warmer. More than one million hectares of land burned in European wildfires, the largest area since records began in 2006. The KNMI notes that the combination of extreme heat and drought that drove these fires now occurs roughly once every 15 years in the current climate, compared with around once every 500 years at the start of the twentieth century. Globally, 2025 entered the top three warmest years ever observed, with average warming reaching about 1.4°C above late nineteenth-century levels and worldwide CO₂ emissions at a record high.

The report also points to systemic risks in the climate system that could materially alter the European risk landscape over coming decades. New KNMI analysis of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) suggests that in high-emission scenarios roughly 70% of model simulations lead to a shutdown of this key ocean current, while even if global warming is limited to 2°C the probability remains around 25%. A collapse would unfold over 50–100 years and is considered a tipping point because, once triggered, it would be very difficult to reverse. For north-western Europe, including the Netherlands, a stalled AMOC would likely mean colder winters and a drier climate, especially in the dry season, with significant impacts on agriculture and water resources.