The world had the hottest April on record, the EU climate change monitoring service has reported.
Each month since June 2023 has been considered the hottest ever recorded on the planet compared to the corresponding month in previous years, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Wednesday.
Carlo Buontempo, Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, noted:
“If you look at the temperature it’s yet again another record-breaking month, and this means that the sequence, the streak of months, record breaking months that started last year in June is continuing and now we are at the 11th month, so that’s one thing and that’s true for the global mean average, it is also true for sea surface temperature.”
The average surface air temperature was 15.03 degrees Celsius, 0.67 degrees above the April average calculated from 1991 to 2020. The temperature was also 1.58 per cent above the pre-industrial reference point set at the Paris climate summit.
While Europe had the second warmest April on record, other regions saw even greater temperature increases. North America, eastern Asia, parts of the Middle East, parts of South America and much of Africa were particularly affected.
In Morocco, the effects of rising temperatures are imminent, with the country preparing for a heatwave that is forecast to hit several provinces between Tuesday and Friday. The Directorate General of Meteorology (DGM) has declared an orange danger level, warning that temperatures could rise to 40-44 degrees Celsius during this period.
The news comes amid Morocco’s ongoing struggle with drought, now in its sixth consecutive year. The scarcity of water resources poses serious challenges, especially for the country’s rain-dependent agricultural sector.
In 2015, nearly 200 governments signed an agreement to phase out fossil fuels in favour of renewable energy in the second half of the century. Last year, the UN said the world was not on track to meet the agreement’s long-term goals, including limiting global warming to 1.5°C.
