Annual Report 2025

The impacts of climate change on health were a major focus for us in 2025, and our Building health resilience through climate services report on how early warning, risk maps, seasonal calendars, and climate projections can be better factored into health-sector decision-making was our most widely read of the year. That work included an examination of the relationship between climate and dengue, malaria and meningitis across Africa and Latin America.

Using a 2023 WMO framework, the report focuses on five key components: leadership, governance, stakeholder engagement, data integration and dissemination.

Case studies from Africa, Asia and South America provide insights into implementing climate services for health, uncovering challenges, stakeholder roles and adaptive strategies that are often overlooked in broader analyses. Qualitative analysis demonstrates how climate services inform priorities such as disease surveillance and resource allocation, linking theory to practice.

With dengue fever a growing public health hazard in Burkina Faso, the Climate Centre and the Netherlands Red Cross 510 team supported the National Society in developing a simplified early action protocol for the vector-borne disease that is likely to be expanding with global warming. This involved methodological guidance through all the steps of EAP development, as well as technical support for risk analysis, data inventory, and triggers for intervention.

The health team generally took part in training for key stakeholders on health-centred anticipatory action.

As part of IDAlert we have been rolling out two creative public engagement strategies. Firstly, our Time is Ticking campaign combines visual art with science to help people understand how tick insects affect the health of humans and animals, and how climate change is expanding their habitats across Europe. Through posters in public spaces across European cities, the campaign invites people to learn, reflect, and take action.

Secondly, we developed cartoons to make our research and its findings more accessible and relatable. Science can be hard to connect with, especially when the topic feels distant or technical; cartoons break down that barrier.

Our book of cartoons tells the story of IDAlert research and outputs, from monitoring and predicting the climate-related expansion of disease-carrying vectors like mosquitoes and ticks in Europe so public health actors can take pre-emptive action.

In 2025, the Climate Centre and the IFRC advanced the Climate Action Journey, which integrates climate risks into existing humanitarian programmes and expands locally led adaptation (LLA).

Our work has increasingly shown that vulnerability shaped by poverty, exclusion, and the growing impacts of humanitarian crises remains the greatest barrier to preventing people adapting to climate change, but their efforts are most meaningful when they are led at the truly local level.

Through the IFRC Global Climate and Resilience Pooled Fund, nine National Societies across Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America received financial support to facilitate LLA through the Climate Action Journey.

In addition, we wrapped up the CAJ with five National Societies in Central Asia and Central Europe and added journey components to Water at the Heart of Climate Action (WHCA) project countries in Africa.

In the CAJ countries, National Societies are ensuring that communities are empowered to address their changing climate risks by analysing their vulnerabilities, designing adaptation actions inclusively, and leading the implementation of their own adaptation solutions.

Our methodologies centre on community leadership to assess, design and implement adaptation and promote partnerships that strengthen community decisions and the design of adaptation.

The CAJ in Nigeria, first rolled out since 2023, for example, includes four communities in Jigawa State and demonstrates how locally led approaches can translate climate awareness into tangible resilience.

Through a community-driven assessment, households identified drought, desertification, and erratic rainfall as their most pressing risks, and prioritized actions to strengthen livelihoods, environmental management, and preparedness.

One of the most significant changes is in women’s financial inclusion and household resilience. Through mothers’ clubs and village savings and loans associations, women are now saving, accessing small loans, and investing in alternative income sources.

This has enabled households to better cope with climate shocks such as crop losses, while also strengthening women’s confidence and decision-making power.

At the same time, communities are beginning to shift from reactive coping to anticipatory action, using seasonal climate information to plan ahead, adjust planting calendars, and prepare for dry periods.

Farmers are also adopting climate-smart practices through field schools, experimenting with improved soil management, drought-resistant crops, and agroforestry.

These changes reflect a growing willingness to innovate and adapt to changing conditions.

In parallel, communities are showing strong engagement in ecosystem restoration, identifying degraded land and planning initiatives such as tree planting and land rehabilitation, demonstrating the link between environmental health and long-term livelihoods.

Another inspiring example through the WHCA comes from the Ethiopia Red Cross Society, a CAJ pioneer. ERCS branches worked on adaptation solutions for water points, ensuring proper governance, community ownership, and collaboration with experts and organizations led to climate-smart, sustainable solutions.

The National Society helped communities define how water sources can cope amid increasing climate impacts when communities regularly suffer from too much water or too little, linking environmental protection and ecosystem management.

An IFRC evaluation of how the Climate Action Journey was perceived by National Societies showed they saw the value of the methodology and appreciated the shift toward empowering communities.

The method was considered instrumental in advancing climate action across National Societies by fostering a cross-sectoral approach, linking national and local knowledge and combining scientific and indigenous information.

The practical tools are considered to be effective, adaptable and scalable across different contexts, and the CAJ seems to be driving new engagements and partnerships effectively.

At the end of the year, we brought our key lessons to the UN climate talks in Brazil, where we expanded our global collaborations, pushing for increased financing and implementation.

The journey will evolve in 2026 towards a 2.0 version to reflect the findings of the evaluation and experience so far, and implementation will continue in Belize, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, Kiribati, Tanzania and Vanuatu.   

This year the urban team continued to advance work on heat action in cities and focused on strengthening the capacity of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement to work on urban adaptation.

We initiated a second edition of the urban climate fellowship programme which guides fellows through a 16-week course on urban climate resilience. We received over 100 applicants from National Societies around the world and were able to accept 30 fellows, of whom 25 graduated from the programme.

This fellowship is essential to strengthen Movement capacity to develop and implement urban adaptation, and many of the alumni from the first edition have become excellent partners, leading urban climate work in National Societies.

Unfortunately, our main source of funding for heat and coastal activities, the USAID-funded CoCHAP programme was halted in January and subsequently cancelled in February; but a one-year grant from the Quadrature Climate Foundation allowed us to continue work on heat risk perception, early warning and policy.

Through this grant, we launched our flagship report Heat Through the Eyes of the Most Vulnerable that builds on heat risk perception surveys conducted as part of CoCHAP and provides a bottom-up perspective on challenges and solutions.

It highlights critical gaps in risk perception such as a lack of understanding of the worst consequences of extreme heat, and the reasons why many well-meaning programmes fail to be accessible to those who are truly the most vulnerable. 

To raise awareness for heat risks and action, we organized the fifth annual Heat Action Day on 2 June with activities in over 300 locations around the world centred on the theme of recognizing the signs of heat-related illnesses.

These included events organized by National Societies, governments and other partners, including art contests, heat runs, regional heat webinars and seminars, workshops, children, women and the elderly, water distributions, cooling stations, and social media campaigns.

The day took on a life of its own, with media reports indicating actions by groups that we had not even been in contact with (the New York governor’s office, for example).

To further spread the message on heat action, we convened experts in Bangkok, Delhi, Kampala and Tanzania to provide input to a new handbook released by the World Bank in September. 

To foster innovations in design and architecture that accounted for extreme heat, we launched the Heat Adaptive Architecture Design Competition and received 31 submissions from different regions, of which the top ten candidates received mentorship in the next phase. 

Through the CASCADE project, the Climate Centre helped organize and facilitate city learning labs in Accra, Harare and Kampala, bringing various urban stakeholders together to explore climate and health challenges, identify research gaps, and propose solutions.  

In 2025 the attribution programme helped people understand the role of climate change in 21 extreme weather events around the world, and was aimed at leading to outcomes or adjustments at the level of national climate policy.

As part of the World Weather Attribution partnership, we published a study on the role of climate change in the deadly Los Angeles wildfires in January.

In March we published three studies on the influence of climate change on heat in South Sudan, floods in Botswana, and a compound heat and flood event in Argentina.

We followed this with three studies in April showing that climate change made weather conditions leading to wildfires in South Korea about twice as likely, that Kinshasa’s deadly floods were mainly driven by vulnerability and exposure factors rather than unusual rainfall, and that an extraordinary March heatwave in Central Asia was up to 10°C hotter due to climate change.

In May we found that climate change increased the heavy rains that led to flooding in the central Mississippi river valley, though effective emergency management limited impacts.

In June we showed that climate change drove record-breaking heat in Iceland and Greenland, threatening cold ecosystems, and that warmer summer days in England have increased.

In July we highlighted how growing exposure and uncertain rainfall trends are increasing risks in Colombia.

In August we found that climate change intensified monsoon rains that worsened floods in Pakistan, made a two-week Fennoscandia heatwave hotter and more likely, and increased the likelihood of wildfire conditions in Cyprus, Greece and Türkiye by a factor of ten.

In September we showed that extreme fire-weather conditions in Spain and Portugal have now become common due to climate change. 

Finally, in November, we found that climate change made both Hurricane Melissa and the five-year Iran drought more likely but drew an inconclusive result in a study of floods after extreme rainfall in Mexico.

Overall, this work makes climate change tangible, giving a scientific answer about the role of climate change and other factors in driving the extreme weather and impacts that the public is experiencing.  

To further explore the use of attribution information, we organized two policy workshops. We visited the Spanish Red Cross in Madrid to discuss extreme heat, floods, and wildfires and organized a virtual policy dialogue on extreme heat in Europe and Central Asia, including panellists from National Societies in the Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Tajikistan and the UK. These dialogues explored the implications of attribution studies for policy areas including energy, construction, agriculture and land use.

This year we participated in a US National Academy of Sciences workshop on the use of attribution findings in humanitarian work – an input to the upcoming NAS report on state of attribution science generally. 

We also developed research on attribution as part of the COMPASS research project by publishing a paper with guidance on integrating qualitative vulnerability information into attribution studies, and developed case studies on attributing compound extreme weather events to climate change in Honduras.

This research continues to encourage the attribution science community to factor in vulnerability, exposure and response into their conceptualization of risk, making their assessments more attuned to the real world. 

Basic Google Analytics showed the monthly audience for our website expanding slightly over the course of the year: from 2,100 unique views in January to 2,600 in December, with an annual average of 2,200, helping with the comms objective of securing the widest possible dissemination of our research, and fulfilling our IFRC mandate of supporting National Societies and improving our collective humanitarian impact. 

That audience is concentrated in the anglosphere, above all in the US, and countries where English is the first language or a widely spoken second language. We continue to try to expand this underlying reality – short of devoting significant resources to translation and a multilingual site – with publications like our Training report on impact-based forecasting: a facilitation guide (Arabic), for example.

The Climate Centre’s January 2025 analysis of the science behind the devastating wildfires in California has turned out to be the most widely read news story in the recent history of our website, and by some margin.

The Climate Centre uses LinkedIn and other social media platforms to share insights on climate-related risks, humanitarian action, and emerging research with practitioners, partners, and decision-makers around the world. We promote publications, events, and resources, helping to start conversations and encourage exchange across the humanitarian and climate communities.

Our current LinkedIn following of 27,491 helped to generate nearly half a million non-unique Impressions in 2025, with 5,441 Reactions, 404 Comments and 26 Reposts in total for the period June 2025 to June 2026 – suggesting a high degree of visibility but a relatively low engagement rate. Our X/Twitter audience has stalled, like others have, and it has not grown above 11.2k for at least two years, still roughly triple the next two biggest IFRC reference centres.  

We generated 114 web news stories over the course of the year, including our usual round-up of the year in December. Bylined blogs kicked off with a piece by Roop Singh who wrote that compound events in which two or more hazards such as heatwaves and floods occur simultaneously or in close succession are becoming more common.

In a blog from Bangkok, Florence Pichon examined the potential of a special financing mechanism for anticipatory action in Timor-Leste; Fleur Monasso – on a visit to Portugal – wrote about a major climate event organized by the Braga branch of the Portuguese Red Cross for World Red Cross Red Crescent Day on 8 May; Tilly Alcayna introduced her examination of how infectious diseases are affected by climate factors; Sayanti Sengupta joined other co-chairs of the USP2030 Working Group on Social Protection and Climate Change to write a blog welcoming the link drawn between climate action and social development for the world summit for social development in Qatar; and from Antananarivo Dorothy Heinrich and Liz Stephens advocated factoring scenario planning into the design of anticipatory action, already used in the humanitarian sector in desktop exercises and simulations to sharpen decision-making.

With January confirmed as the 18th in the previous 19 months when the global average temperature was more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level, Aditya Bahadur said in an interview with the Finnish Red Cross that “[w]e have entered uncharted territory. The natural and weather systems of the Earth are now changing rapidly in ways we do not fully understand.”

Among our other direct media engagement, Catalina Jaime told Colombia’s El Espectador newspaper her contribution to the IPCC’s seventh assessment of the global climate would centre on adaptation amid fragility and poverty.  

ESRI’s Olivier Cottray interviewed Cornelia Scholz about her work with the ICRC Mali delegation to develop a borehole stress index that will enable water engineers to base decisions on where to drill on combined environmental and security risk instead of even educated guesswork.

A multimedia highlight of the year came when – through Director of Programmes Julie Arrighi – we were granted limited access to winners of a photo contest run by the Global Heat Health Information Network depicting extreme heat – traditionally a difficult area to illustrate.

The IFRC continued to cross-promote our output while we did likewise with theirs (example).

Finance

The Climate Centre – an independent foundation under Dutch law – remains grateful to its hosts the Netherlands Red Cross, which also assists with human resources and legal affairs.

We were supported last year by the European Commission, the ICRC and the IFRC secretariat or their delegations and these National Societies, in each case with the financial support of their public or governments (alphabetically): 

American Red Cross
British Red Cross
Danish Red Cross 
Finnish Red Cross
French Red Cross
Georgia Red Cross
German Red Cross
Irish Red Cross
Luxembourg Red Cross
Netherlands Red Cross 
Norwegian Red Cross
Swedish Red Cross

Other contributors were (alphabetically):* AtkinsRealis UK International, Bezos Earth Fund, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CGIAR, (UN) Complex Risk Analytics Fund, Deltares, Dimos Egaleo, Dutch Research Council, European Research Executive Agency, Institute of Development Studies, International Development Research Centre, (UK) Met Office, MSF Switzerland, Norwegian Refugee Council, Norwegian Research Centre, Oxford Policy Management, People in Need, Quadrature Climate Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Start Network, Swiss Church Aid HEKS/EPER, UNDRR, UNEP, Wellcome Trust, WFP, and the World Bank.  

We are also grateful for contributions from these universities: Bristol, Cape Town, Reading, Toronto, and VU (Amsterdam).

A full financial statement will be available in our hard-copy report later this year, along with an infographic summary to be added here.

As always, we thank our donors for their generous support.

*Includes agencies best known by their acronyms.