Climate In 2025: Extreme Weather Events That Shaped India's Year

As 2025 draws to a close, it's worth looking back at what's been a genuinely terrifying year for India's climate. If there's one thing this year will be remembered for, it's the extreme weather events that highlighted the country's vulnerability to climate change.

The Year's Worst Hits

Remember that brutal April heatwave? Delhi was absolutely sweltering, and temperatures crossed 40°C. It doesn't sound that dramatic until you realise it was 4 degrees hotter than similar heatwaves before 1987. Human-induced climate change was the main culprit, affecting not just India but Pakistan too, according to a ClimaMeter study.  

Then there was Cyclone Montha. The destruction it left behind was staggering, about Rs 53 billion in damages, impacting Andhra Pradesh the most. 

Tamil Nadu experienced heavy rainfall, while alerts went out to Odisha, West Bengal, Puducherry, and several other regions. Meanwhile, North India faced cold waves, with fog and low temperatures, basically making everyone's daily routine a nightmare.

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Extreme Weather Events On 99% Of Days

The Centre for Science and Environment and Down To Earth dropped their Climate India 2025 report in November, and the findings are shocking. India faced extreme weather events on 99% of days during the first nine months of 2025. When it comes to extreme weather events, we're talking about heatwaves, cold waves, lightning, storms, heavy rain, floods and landslides.

As per the report, at least 4,064 lives were lost, and 9.47 million hectares of crops were affected. This is just a summary; the details of the report are far more scary, highlighting the urgent need to work on quick response action during such weather conditions.

The northwest region recorded the highest frequency of extreme weather events, with 257 event days, followed closely by the east and northeast at 229 days.

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The Human Cost

Human Cost is what really matters. Such events have taken a devastating toll on human life, with 4,064 deaths reported between January and September 2025. In Madhya Pradesh, most people were killed (532 deaths), followed by Andhra Pradesh (484 deaths) and Jharkhand (478 deaths).

The economic impact of these events is staggering, with 9.47 million hectares of crops affected, 99,533 houses destroyed, and approximately 58,982 animals killed as farmers watched helplessly. The report also estimates that the true damage is likely much higher due to incomplete data collection.

Breaking All the Wrong Records

This year has been a year of unwanted milestones when it comes to weather events. January was India's fifth driest since 1901. February turned out to be the warmest in 124 years – think about that for a second. September recorded the seventh-highest mean temperature on record. The monsoon season, which India depends on for most of its rainfall, was a major concern. All 122 days of the monsoon season saw some kind of extreme weather event. 

What Needs To Be Done

Sunita Narain, who heads the Centre for Science and Environment, didn't mince words in the report: "Given the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, the country no longer needs to count just the disasters. What we need to understand is the scale."

She's pushing for the world to wake up to the urgency of cutting emissions. "We have to reduce the amount of CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere, because no amount of adaptation is going to be possible with the scale of disasters we are now witnessing," she said, adding: "The disasters of today will become the new normal of tomorrow."

The monsoon season has become the deadliest period. Of those 4,064 deaths, 3,007 happened during monsoon months, which has been the highest deaths during the monsoon season since 2022. Kiran Pandey, programme director of CSE's environmental resources team and one of the report's authors, pointed out something particularly worrying: rising temperatures during monsoon season mess with the entire system. "This can trigger erratic and extreme weather events - from floods to droughts - while threatening agriculture, food security and public health," she explained.