‘Stop all outdoor activities’: South Korea records its highest ever temperature

Women use portable fans to cool off at the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul in July. South Korea has recorded its hottest temperature and issued a heat alert. Photograph: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images

By Mark Saunokonoko

 Authorities issue alert saying indoor spaces without airconditioning are ‘dangerous’ as temperatures pass 40C for fifth straight day 

South Korea has registered its highest temperature since records began more than a century ago, as authorities warned people to “immediately” stop all outdoor activities in affected areas.

The south-eastern city of Yangsan saw the temperature reach 42.5C on Sunday afternoon, the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) said, the highest temperature reported since modern weather observation began in 1904.

Yangsan has been the centre of an ongoing heatwave, where temperatures exceeded 40C for a fifth consecutive day on Sunday, while many other cities including Daegu and Busan are seeing temperatures climb into the high 30s.

 

People gathered in airconditioned shopping malls or cafes to escape the blistering temperatures. Others sought relief under mist-spray zones set up in Seoul. Ju Dong-yeol, 27, took refuge from the heat in a Starbucks in the South Korean capital, along with his parents and told AFP “it is too hot to be outside doing anything”.

“I can’t think of anything else to do other than stay in airconditioned places like home, shopping malls and cafes,” the office worker said.

 

The city of Gyeongju, about 240km south-east of Seoul, reached 40.3C on Sunday, its highest recorded temperature in eight years.

North Korea has also faced punishing heat, with temperatures soaring as high as 40C in some regions, state media reported on Monday. Residents in Pyongyang have endured a week of nights where the temperature has not dropped below 25C.

More than 20 localities in South Korea were under emergency heatwave alerts on Sunday – a new warning category introduced this year to better address rising temperatures. An emergency alert is issued when areas experiencing a heatwave are forecast to hit perceived temperatures of 38C or an actual temperature of 39C for the day.

Workers harvest strawberries under parasols to protect against the scorching sun in Miryang, South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea. Photograph: YONHAP/EPA

 

Issuing a heat warning, the weather agency urged people to “immediately stop all outdoor activities”, adding that “indoor spaces without air conditioning are dangerous”.

“Move immediately to a cool place, such as a designated cooling centre or a shaded area, and stay hydrated while resting,” it advised.

Fearing for those people most vulnerable to heat, the prime minister, Han Seong-sook, ordered local officials to strengthen safety checks on residents and to ensure a stable power and water supply was maintained.

Easterly winds are expected to push the extreme heat further inland on Monday, with Seoul forecast to reach 37C. “Temperatures in South Jeolla and South Gyeongsang are expected to exceed 39C, bringing extreme heat at life-threatening levels,” the KMA said.

People stand in a mist-spraying zone to cool off on a street in Seoul. Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images

 

Officials are also monitoring Typhoon Dolphin, which is now tracking towards China’s south-east coastal regions, south of the Korean peninsula, and could dictate how long the stifling heat persists.

If the typhoon moves towards eastern China, it could increase humidity and potentially worsening the heatwave and tropical nights in Korea, the KMA said. But a path closer to the south of the peninsula could bring stronger winds, greater cloud cover and rain, temporarily easing the heat.

KMA data show the average annual number of heatwave days in the country has more than doubled to 19 in the past five years.

A heatwave day is defined as one with a maximum temperature of at least 33C.

South Korea’s professional baseball league was forced to cancel one game in Changwon after the city’s temperature climbed to 39.5C, marking the second consecutive game cancellation in the city.

“The decision was made with the safety and health of spectators and players as the top priority, as a severe heatwave warning remains in effect for the Changwon area,” said the Korea Baseball Organization in a statement.

Scientists warn that extreme weather events such as heatwaves are becoming more frequent and intense as a result of human-induced climate change.

Adding to the extreme weather is the return this year of El Niño – a natural climate phenomenon that warms Pacific Ocean surface temperatures and typically occurs every two to seven years.

With Agence France-Presse

‘We have lost everything’: extreme rainfall across Asia brings flash floods and typhoons

 

Bangladesh is one of several countries in the region to experience heavy rains and flash floods. Photograph: Rayhan Ahmed/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
 

Residents and rescue workers inspect buildings damaged by heavy flooding in the eastern province of Nuristan, Afghanistan. Photograph: Wahidullah Kakar/AP

 

From Afghanistan to Taiwan, unprecedented deluge highlights devastating impact of climate breakdown

By Natasha May and Jonathan Watts

“It rained for 10 days and 10 nights, non-stop – I’d never seen anything like it,” says Anar Gul, a construction worker who lives in the remote district of Dur Baba in eastern Afghanistan.

The houses in his village are built from stone and mud, which makes them extremely vulnerable to heavy rains. After days of rain, Gul’s kitchen collapsed and his neighbour, Sayed Afsar Sadat, saw a large part of his house completely destroyed. “Rains like this are coming heavier and earlier each year,” says Sadat. “They are destroying the roads and washing away our crops. It’s impacting us directly.”

 

Last week, torrential rains and flash floods wiped out villages and towns in Afghanistan, leaving at least 31 people dead and hundreds missing. It’s been a similar picture in neighbouring countries, with the monsoon rains sparking chaos across the region. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have all seen erratic, sudden heavy dumps of water.

Jesmin Akter lived in the city of Chattogram, on the south-eastern coast of Bangladesh, which received a record 412.3mm of rainfall in 24 hours in early July, leading to the flash flood that swept through the Banshkhali district where they live. She says her children “understand that we are in a very bad situation”.

Overnight the rains took the little they had; their poultry died, their paddy field flooded, their house collapsed and all their belongings in it – children’s books, school bags, toys, clothes, kitchen items – ruined.

Akter carried her six children through chest-deep water to her mother’s house. There they stayed in the crowded conditions for over a week until the water receded.

 Anar Gul, who lives in a remote mountain village in the Dur Baba district of eastern Afghanistan, says he has never seen rain like it. Photograph: IFRC/Mark South.

 

“We have lost everything,” Akter said. Their house beside the canal was not in a good condition, but a few months ago the family had repaired it. “Now the flood has destroyed it again. We have no money. We are surviving on the food assistance we receive from different organisations.” They have gone back to the ruins of their home, but her children sleep on plastic sheets laid on the wet floor and she worries for their safety, especially that the unsanitary conditions will lead to disease. Her daughter has developed a fever.

As wildfires rage across Europe and North America, the unprecedented rains continue elsewhere. While South Korea swings between heatwave and downpour, in Japan and Vietnam torrential rain has led to landslides. China, meanwhile, has seen bouts of extreme rainfall since the flood season began in April, according to the water resources ministry in mid-July, marking the start of a month-long peak flood control window. More than 600 rivers have since risen above warning levels – a 35% jump from the average for the same period over the past five years.

Sayed Afsar Sadat in Dur Baba says rains are destroying the roads and washing away crops. Photograph: IFRC/Meer Abdullah Rasikh.

In the south-western city of Chongqing, a huge landslide after torrential rain killed at least 11 people and left 50 missing, with rescue efforts still ongoing. Separately, a flash flood at a scenic camping spot in the north-central province of Gansu left 10 people dead and injured 23 others.

The flood season across the region has been exacerbated by successive storms. Typhoon Noul, the strongest to make landfall in China so far this year, prompted the evacuation of more than 890,000 people in Guangdong as of Sunday evening, according to provincial authorities. In early July, Typhoon Maysak inundated parts of Guangxi and swept through commercial snake farms, allowing hundreds of snakes to escape.

Forecasters have warned that more wet weather is on the way. Much of northern China, including Beijing, is expected to receive 20% to 50% more rain than usual, while four to six typhoons are forecast to make landfall in or affect the country this summer, above the average of 4.2, according to the China Meteorological Administration.

 Taiwan, an island that lies in the path of typhoons in the north-west Pacific, has also seen a rise in extreme rainfall. In June, repeated downpours caused more than NT$330m (about US$10.2m) in agricultural losses across Taiwan, according to the agriculture ministry, while the capital Taipei recorded its highest monthly rainfall in more than a century.

Torrential rain flooded the streets of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Photograph: Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters

The extreme weather across the region can clearly be linked to climate change. Climate scientists have long predicted that large areas of Asia will disproportionately suffer from more intense heat, humidity and drought as a result of climate disruption caused by the burning of gas, oil and coal. The most recent report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said rising temperatures raise the threat of “floods in monsoon regions in south, south-east and east Asia, and glacier melting in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region”.

And World Weather Attribution scientists have warned that extreme rainfall from cyclones is being “supercharged” in south-east Asia, with a clear pattern of increasingly heavy rain over recent decades. 

In early July, Typhoon Maysak inundated parts of Guangxi in south China. Photograph: Cao Yiming/Xinhua/AP

 

The year 2025 saw devastating storms and rainfall across the region. It also saw ocean temperatures rise to record heights. So far, this year has brought record-breaking heatwaves. Extreme rainfall is more common and more intense because of human-caused climate breakdown across most of the world, particularly in Europe, most of Asia, central and eastern North America, and parts of South America, Africa and Australia. This is because warmer air can hold more water vapour and flooding has most likely become more frequent and severe in these locations as a result.

“More intense rainfall is an expected consequence of us heating the planet by burning fossil fuels and building up more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere can carry more water, so when it rains, it rains harder. Also hotter conditions cause air to rise faster and drive more intense thunderstorms,” said Richard Betts, head of the climate impacts strategic area at the Met Office Hadley Centre.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in providing aid helped the Guardian obtain interviews with those affected.

Typhoon Noul (pictured in Hong Kong) prompted the evacuation of more than 890,000 people in Guangdong. Photograph: Venron Yuen/Nexpher/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

 

Dr Hosam Faysal, the head of IFRC’s country delegation in Afghanistan, said “these are the very real, humanitarian effects of a changing climate … becoming increasingly volatile”.

Faysal urged governments to ensure there was more investment in locally-led preparedness and mitigation in order to reduce the loss of life and suffering before climate-related disasters happened.

“The coming forecast El Niño is a clear example – waiting to respond to the extreme needs we can see coming only once they arrive will cost lives.”

• Research by Yu-chen Li

 

Japan records its first ‘cruelly hot day’ as cities swelter in 40-degree heat

Japan’s meteorological agency coined the term kokushobi – or “cruelly hot day” to warn the public of dangers tied to extreme heat. Photograph: Nicolas Datiche/SIPA/Shutterstock

by  Gavin Blair in Tokyo

 In April Japan coined new term kokushobi for days above 40C as country advises workers to wear shorts to the office to cope with stifling heat

 

Japan logged its first official kokushobi or “cruelly hot day” on Tuesday since the new term for when temperatures top 40 degrees Celsius was introduced in April. The Japan Meteorological Agency coined the new designation to warn the public of the heat dangers of days that were once freak weather events but have now become more common.

The central Japan cities of Gujo and Tajimi in Gifu prefecture, along with Toyota in Aichi prefecture, all hit 40C. Gujo’s 40C and Toyota’s 40.1C were all-time highs recorded at their respective weather stations.

 

Across 914 weather stations nationwide, 278 registered temperatures exceeding 35C or moshobi – “extremely hot days,” the highest level of warning until the recent introduction of the new terminology. Days over 25C are called natsubi or “summer days”, while those exceeding 30C are known as manatsubi – “true summer days.”

On Monday, a man in his 40s was found dead on a street in Sanjo, Niigata prefecture, while another in his 70s died in Kanagawa, southwest of Tokyo. Both are believed to have succumbed to the heat.

Heatstroke deaths topped 2,000 for the first time in 2024, while more than 100,000 people were taken to hospital last year between the beginning of May and late September, according to the fire and disaster management agency.

 

The rising heat is affecting many aspects of Japanese life – including yields and the quality of rice, a staple. In response, farmers are planting more heat-tolerant varieties, while some are switching to crops such as avocado that have not traditionally been grown at scale in Japan.

Impacts are also being seen in sport, with the most high-profile being the restructuring of the hugely popular koshien national high school baseball tournament. Played in the sweltering heat of August, the games have been split into morning and evening sessions since 2024 to reduce the chances of heatstroke for both players and spectators.

 

Meanwhile, office workers are being encouraged to wear shorts on hot summer days, the latest relaxing of Japan’s buttoned-down corporate culture as part of “Cool Biz” measures to reduce electricity consumption through lower use of airconditioning. Previous initiatives have encouraged “salarymen” to shed jackets and ties, and wear short-sleeved shirts but this year’s expected scorching summer has prompted calls for another level of casualness.

Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike announced the new clothing recommendations for office wear which also include polo shirts, T-shirts and trainers where appropriate, against the backdrop of expected high temperatures and a “challenging outlook for electricity supply”.

A study by the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) and Tokyo’s Waseda University in 2025 found that without drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, school sports will become unplayable outdoors by the 2060s.

Average summer temperatures in Japan have risen about 1.3C over the past 100 years, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). Both 2023 and 2024 were the hottest years since records began in 1898, but last year saw those levels surpassed again. The summer of 2025 was 2.4C above the average of the previous three decades, with 132 weather stations logging their highest ever average heat and a new all-time Japanese high of 41.8C at Isesaki, Gunma, north of Tokyo, on 5 August.

In the lowest place on Earth, a sea is rapidly dying — and no one can agree how to save it

 The western shore of the Dead Sea, a hyper-salty body of water which is rapidly shrinking.

Cyril Theophilos, CNN

 

By

Laura Paddison

 

 

The Dead Sea — 

The motorboat cut through the aquamarine water of the Dead Sea, past dazzling-white formations forged from salt crystals. Jake Ben Zaken, the boat captain, pointed to a patch of darker water nearby indicating a sinkhole beneath the seabed. These are both signs of an unfolding ecological disaster, he said.

The Dead Sea sits where Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian land meet and is a place of extremes. It’s the lowest point on the planet, around 1,400 feet below sea level. It’s also one of the world’s saltiest water bodies, nearly 10 times saltier than the ocean, which makes the water so dense people can float effortlessly on its surface.

But this unique body of water is dying. Every year it recedes around 4 feet, as the impacts of human activities and climate change take a heavy toll. Over the past five decades, its surface area has shrunk by roughly a third. As the water retreats, it’s forging a new landscape of sinkholes and salt-encrusted shorelines that is both strikingly beautiful and a haunting reminder that the Dead Sea’s future hangs in the balance. 

Jake Ben Zaken runs boat tours on the Dead Sea and has a front row seat to the rapid changes.

Laura Paddison/CNN

 

 

Ben Zaken, who runs the company Salty Landscapes from Mitzpe Shalem, a settlement in the West Bank, has been taking people out onto the Dead Sea for more than 12 years. It’s given him a front row seat to the alarming changes.

His boat tours used to start from Mineral Beach, just to the south of Mitzpe Shalem, but he was forced to move when sinkholes closed it in 2015. His current location is safe for now, but the landscape is shifting fast. “Every year we get about seven and a half meters of new shoreline,” Ben Zaken said. 

 

There are multiple plans to save the Dead Sea, but the years tick by and little happens as costs, fraught regional politics and a lack of political urgency stymie action, experts told CNN. Unless something is done, the world risks losing a unique ecosystem, they warned.

“It is a treasure,” said Peleg Gottdiener of EcoPeace Middle East, an organization of Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian environmentalists. “There’s nothing like the Dead Sea.” 

 

The Dead Sea’s demise is human-caused.

 

This landlocked swath of salty water is technically a lake. Water enters from the Jordan River, which starts on the Syria-Lebanon border, flows through the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, then continues its journey south toward the Dead Sea, with Jordan on one side and Israel and the occupied West Bank on the other.

Over the decades, the Jordan River, and its main tributary the Yarmouk, have shrunk as they’ve been dammed and diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan to quench the thirst of people, crops and livestock. The river used to transport 1.3 billion cubic meters of water to the Dead Sea; that has fallen to roughly 100 million cubic meters.

The mineral extraction industry is the other major driver of decline.

In the late 1970s, the Dead Sea split into two basins, now separated by a strip of dry land. The deeper northern basin, where Ben Zaken operates his boat tours, is the natural remnant of the sea. The southern basin is artificially maintained, made up of a series of industrial evaporation pools. 

 

Companies on the Israeli and Jordanian sides — the Dead Sea Works and the Arab Potash Company — pump water from the northern basin into the pools. The water evaporates in the sun leaving behind a mineral-rich brine, from which companies extract minerals including potash and magnesium for fertilizers and other industrial uses.

There’s another force at work too: climate change. Droughts are becoming fiercer and more prolonged, and rainfall is rarer. Even without river diversions and industry, there’s evidence climate change impacts would cause the Dead Sea to shrink, albeit far more slowly, said Yael Kiro, a geochemist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who studies the Dead Sea. 

 As it shrinks, the Dead Sea is changing. It’s becoming even saltier. Since the 1980s, concentrations of salt in the water have become too high to remain dissolved, said professor Nadav Lensky, director of the Dead Sea Observatory at the Geological Survey of Israel.

 This causes the salt to form solid crystals, which drift like snow down to the sea floor, creating natural salt sculptures. Most crystals accumulate as salt layers forming intricate structures that can take many shapes, influenced by water temperature and currents. Some look like chimneys, others like domes or mushrooms. 

Salt crystals on the shore of the Dead Sea. Laura Paddison/CNN

 

Salt sculptures take many shapes. Laura Paddison/CNN 

 

 

The retreating water is also changing the landscape in a more dangerous way.

At an entrance to Ein Gedi, a once-popular Dead Sea beach resort now permanently closed, a big yellow sign reads “no entry for pedestrians.” It’s soon clear why. The road toward the shore has been carved up by huge, circular sinkholes. 

 To get closer to the water means picking your way past the sinkholes and over fallen palm trees. A restaurant, changing rooms and gas station all stand abandoned nearer the shoreline. A set of broken steps leads down to a beach now so far away it’s impossible to see. The resort has an eerie, almost apocalyptic feel. 

A sinkkhole on the road to Ein Gedi, a now-closed beach resort on the western shore of the Dead Sea in Israel. Cyril Theophilos, CNN

The sinkholes that closed Ein Gedi, and other Dead Sea beaches, are a direct result of the water’s retreat, Kiro said. Rapidly dropping water levels allow freshwater to seep into the ground, dissolving the ancient layers of salt and creating underground cavities. When these grow too large, the ground above eventually collapses, causing sinkholes to open up suddenly and without warning.

There are now more than 6,000 sinkholes around the Dead Sea and they threaten businesses and residents as well as tourism, which, on the Israeli side, is now almost exclusively in the industrial southern basin. Few tourists will likely realize that they’re bathing in an artificial evaporation pond. 

A visitor to the DMZ Medical Spa in southern Israel floats in the evaporation ponds of the Dead Sea. Bill Weir/CNN

 

The need to halt the Dead Sea’s decline is urgent, but there is no simple solution.

One idea is to find a new source of water to replenish it. In 2013 Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed a memorandum of understanding to explore the idea of pumping water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. 

 

The plan involved constructing a desalination plant on the Jordanian coast to produce freshwater and building a pipeline, more than 100 miles long, to bring the salty brine created during desalination to the Dead Sea.

Some environmental experts are concerned that adding water with a different chemical composition could cause algae blooms or the formation of white gypsum crystals in the Dead Sea. 

 Hazim El-Naser, chairman of the Middle East Water Forum and former Jordanian water minister, said extensive environmental studies have shown up to 600 million cubic meters of seawater could be added “without any problems.” For now, however, the project has stalled due to its multibillion-dollar price tag and the increasing difficulty of forging regional cooperation. 

 Another idea is to restore the Jordan River by reducing diversion and releasing more water into it — potentially using treated wastewater. But some experts warn the water will simply be removed before it reaches the Dead Sea, such is the need in this parched region. It’s “impossible to take (water) from the people unless you provide an alternative,” El-Naser said.

A dead palm tree lies across the road in Ein Gedi, which used to be a popular beach resort on the Dead Sea. Laura Paddison/CNN

Broken steps lead down to the shoreline at Ein Gedi. Laura Paddison/CNN

 

Others want to target industry. Abdelrahman Tamimi, the general director of the Palestinian Hydrology Group, said companies should stop pumping water to extract minerals. Others say the solution isn’t completely stopping industry — which supports jobs and tax revenues — but cutting its water use.

The Dead Sea Works has extracted minerals from the Dead Sea under a concession agreement since 1961. This comes to an end in 2030, and the draft of the new agreement does include fees for water use.

 

If people are making money from the Dead Sea’s water, “take some of that money and turn it back to water to make sure that we have the Dead Sea forever,” said Meirav Abadi, legal counsel for the Israel Union for Environmental Defense.

ICL Group, which owns Dead Sea Works, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment but says on its website it withdraws a net total of 160 million cubic meters of water a year from the Dead Sea and that it is “innovating to develop sustainable water management strategies.” 

The western shore of the Dead Sea. Cyril Theopilus, CNN

 EcoPeace’s Gottdeiner said a big hurdle to any solution is that ultimately “there’s no sense of urgency” at a political level. He and other experts believe it’s probably impossible to restore the Dead Sea to the level it was a few decades ago; the focus instead should be on stabilizing its decline.

 

Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection rejected claims of a lack of urgency. “The ongoing decline of the Dead Sea is a serious environmental issue of national and regional importance,” a spokesperson said, adding “the Ministry continues to advance policy and planning efforts to address the issue.”

For now, those with homes and businesses along its shores must live with uncertainty.

Ben Zaken of Salty Landscapes knows he’s on borrowed time. Every time he shows up at the beach where he starts his boat tours, he scans the sand to see if a sinkhole has appeared. It would put him out of business immediately, he said, and there’s no insurance that will cover what now seems like an inevitability.

Change here doesn’t happen slowly, he said, “it’s a rapid-paced disaster.”

Zeena Saifi and Jeremy Diamond contributed to this report

Tokyo workers asked to swap suits for shorts to combat energy costs and heat

 

People on the Shibuya crossroad during an intense Tokyo heatwave in June last year. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

by Justin McCurry in Tokyo

 

Public servants working for the Tokyo metropolitan government are being encouraged to swap their suits for shorts this summer to combat sweltering heat and rising energy costs caused by the US-Israel war on Iran.

Inspired by the country’s Cool Biz energy-saving initiative, Tokyo officials hope the measure will cut dependence on air conditioning.

Cool Biz, launched by the environment ministry in 2005, initially encouraged bureaucrats to dispense with ties and jackets, but has so far stopped short of allowing them to display their bare legs in front of colleagues.

Japan and other countries in Asia are growing anxious about the economic effects of the conflict in the Middle East, amid rising oil prices and shortages of petroleum products such as jet fuel.

 

Resource-poor Japan is particularly vulnerable to a prolonged war as it depends on the Middle East for 90% of its oil imports, most of which pass through the strait of Hormuz. About 20% of the natural gas used in South Korea comes via the same route.

Vietnam, South Korea and other countries have taken steps to ration energy use, while other Asian nations have encouraged government officials to work from home or reduced the length of the working week. In Seoul, authorities have urged residents to make short trips on foot or by bicycle.

 

Japan has already tapped into its large strategic oil reserves, with local media reporting on Friday that it plans to release a further 20 days’ worth from 1 May. It is also sourcing oil imports from suppliers that do not use the strait of Hormuz.

Experts have warned that if shipping in the vital waterway doesn’t return to normal soon, the world’s fourth-biggest economy will eventually face a crude oil shortage. That could force businesses and households to make more drastic cuts in petrol and electricity usage reminiscent of those introduced during the oil shocks of the 1970s.

The threat of an energy crunch had been “one of the factors” in allowing Tokyo government staff to wear casual clothes to work, Agence France-Presse said, adding that some employees had been spotted in shorts, T-shirts and short-sleeved blouses since the initiative’s launch this week to coincide with the start of Japan’s heatstroke warning system.

“I was a bit nervous, but it’s very comfortable, and I feel like it’ll improve my work efficiency,” a metropolitan government official who was wearing shorts to the office for the first time told the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. “As it gets even hotter, I’d like to come in earlier and work from home as well.”

Citing “a severe outlook for electricity supply and demand,” Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, who as environment minister was behind the Cool Biz campaign two decades ago, told reporters: “We encourage cool attire that prioritises comfort, including polo shirts, T-shirts and sneakers and – depending on job responsibilities – shorts”.

War notwithstanding, Japanese employers have been forced to rethink old rules on workplace attire as a result of the climate crisis. Last year, the country endured its hottest summer since records began in 1898, according to the meteorological agency.

Now that it is no longer unheard of for temperatures to rise to 40C or above, the agency last week announced a new extreme weather event: kokusho, or “cruelly hot”.

After 1,200 years, cherry blossom record to live on despite Japanese scientist’s death. Prof Yasuyuki Aono’s meticulous work charted shifting bloom dates as a marker of climate change

 

People viewing cherry blossoms in Osaka last week. Photograph: Jiji Press/EPA

by  Chris Baraniuk

 

Even in his final months, he counted the days until the cherry blossoms. Prof Yasuyuki Aono of Osaka Metropolitan University spent his career gathering data on the spring flowering dates of cherry trees in Japan in what is one of the world’s longest climate records tracking a seasonal occurrence.

Using sources dating as far back as the 9th century, he revealed that cherry tree flowerings have occurred progressively earlier in recent decades – a now famous marker of climate change.

 

Last April, Aono posted a photo to social media of his spreadsheet. He had just completed the 2025 entry, recording “4 [April]” as the peak flowering date for the particular cherry tree species he tracked, the mountain cherry, or Prunus jamasakura.

Below this, the next row was already marked “2026” but Aono never got to fill it in. He died on 5 August last year, according to former colleagues contacted by the Guardian.

Yasuyuki Aono learned old forms of Japanese so he could read 9th-century records. Photograph: Richard Primack

“You can very much see that he planned to continue,” said Tuna Acisu, a data scientist at Our World in Data, an online platform that publishes a chart based on Aono’s cherry tree data. “That made me a little bit emotional.”

Now, following a search launched by Acisu last week – sparked by fears that no one would be able to continue the 1,200-year cherry blossom record – a researcher in Japan has stepped forward and offered to make formal observations of the mountain cherry’s spring flowerings.

“He is consulting the same sources as Prof Aono to get us this year’s cherry blossom peak bloom and said he will confirm the date in the coming days,” Acisu said. The researcher in question asked to remain anonymous until the arrangement is finalised.

Acisu and colleagues first realised that something may have happened to Aono when they noticed in January that his university web page was no longer active. They then learned that he had died and that no other researcher or institution had emerged to carry on his observations. Spring arrived with no new mountain cherry data.

After Acisu launched her campaign to find a new cherry blossom observer, she received dozens of messages. “It’s really great to know that the dataset is being continued,” she said, expressing her gratitude to the new researcher. “I feel very relieved.”

 

Crucially, Acisu had sought a contact in Japan who could continue tracking not only the same species of cherry, but also in the same location: Arashiyama, Kyoto.

There are other projects that monitor cherry tree flowerings around Japan, since cherry bloom festivals are an important part of culture and tourism in the country, but not this specific species. For example, the Japan Weather Association monitors a different species: the Somei-yoshino cherry (Prunus x yedoensis), which was cultivated in the 19th century.

 

That Aono was able to compile flowering data for the mountain cherry over a period spanning more than 1,200 years is what gave his data series such significance, said Acisu.

Scientists have found the signature of climate change in a wide variety of other sources, including tree rings, plant pigments deposited in seabed sediments, and even temperature and humidity records jotted down by organ tuners in British churches.

Among the revelations made by Aono were the 2021 and 2023 peak flowering dates – they are the earliest in the entire mountain cherry record, occurring on the 85th and 84th day of those years, respectively.

Aono’s work on the mountain cherry was “extremely important”, said Toshio Katsuki, a dendrologist at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute in Ibaraki prefecture, who added that efforts to continue recording the same species’ spring flowering dates would be academically valuable.

Tourists wearing kimonos pose with cherry blossoms in Kyoto at the end of March this year. Photograph: Manami Yamada/Reuters

Richard Primack, a professor of biology at Boston University, met Aono on a trip to Japan in 2006. Aono told him that he had learned to read old forms of Japanese in order to build up his dataset of mountain cherry flowering dates. In dusty historical archives, Aono would find references to cherry blossom festivals in Kyoto and, from that, was able to calculate the flowering dates for specific years.

While some years are missing, the earliest record he found dated to 812. “It was really quite an amazing experience,” said Primack, remembering the meeting. “You just realise how dedicated an individual he was.”

In a paper published earlier this month, Primack and Katsuki described how flowering of the Somei-yoshino cherry also appears to be affected by climate change in southern areas of Japan. Data from 1965 to 2024 shows that milder winters were increasingly causing the spring-flowering cherries to have “a kind of bedraggled look, rather than a full, dazzling display,” said Primack. “Many of the flower buds were falling off without opening.”

Himalayas bare and rocky after reduced winter snowfall, scientists warn

 

 

by Navin Singh Khadka Environment correspondent

 

 

Much less winter snow is falling on the Himalayas, leaving the mountains bare and rocky in many parts of the region in a season when they should be snow-clad, meteorologists have said.

They say most winters in the last five years have seen a drop compared to average snowfall between 1980 and 2020.

Rising temperature also means what little snow falls melts very quickly and some lower-elevation areas are also seeing more rain and less snow, which is at least in part due to global warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scientific reports.

Studies have also shown there is now what is known as "snow drought" during winter in many parts of the Himalayan region.

Accelerated melting of glaciers in the wake of global warming has long been a major crisis facing India's Himalayan states and other countries in the region. This dwindling snowfall during winter is making matters worse, experts have told the BBC.

They say that the reduction in ice and snow will not only change how the Himalayas look, it will also impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people and many ecosystems in the region.

As temperatures rise in spring, snow accumulated during winter melts and the runoff feeds river systems. This snowmelt is a crucial source for the region's rivers and streams, supplying water for drinking, irrigation and hydropower.

Apart from impacting the water supply, less winter precipitation - rainfall in the lowlands and snowfall on the mountains - also means the region risks being gutted by forest fires due to dry conditions, experts said.

They add that vanishing glaciers and declining snowfall destabilise mountains as they lose the ice and snow that act as cement to keep them intact. Disasters like rockfalls, landslides, glacial lakes bursting out and devastating debris flows are already becoming more common.

So, how serious is the drop in snowfall?

Meteorologists say central Himalayas have also seen significant decrease in winter snowfall leaving mountains bare and rocky

The Indian Meteorological Department recorded no precipitation - rainfall and snowfall - in almost all of northern India in December.

The weather department says there is a high possibility that many parts of northwest India, including Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh states, and the federally-administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, will see 86% less than long period average (LPA) rainfall and snowfall between January and March.

LPA is the rainfall or snow recorded over a region over 30 to 50 years and use its average to classify current weather as normal, excess or deficient.

According to the weather department, north India's LPA rainfall between 1971 and 2020 was 184.3 millimetre.

Meteorologists say the sharp drop in precipitation is not just a one-off thing.

"There is now strong evidence across different datasets that winter precipitation in the Himalayas is indeed decreasing," said Kieran Hunt, principal research fellow in tropical meteorology at University of Reading in the UK.

A study Hunt co-authored and published in 2025 has included four different datasets between 1980 and 2021, and they all show a decrease in precipitation in the western and part of the central Himalayas.

Using datasets from ERA-5 (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis), Hemant Singh, a research fellow with the Indian Institute of Technology in Jammu, says snowfall in the north western Himalayas has decreased by 25% in the past five years compared to 40-year long-term average (1980-2020).

Women walk along a mountain path in Uttarakhand state

Meteorologists say Nepal, within which the central Himalayas is situated, is also seeing a significant drop in winter precipitation.

"Nepal has seen zero rainfall since October, and it seems the rest of this winter will remain largely dry. This has been the case more or less in all the winters in the last five years," says Binod Pokharel, associate professor of meteorology at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu.

Meteorologists, however, also add that there have been heavy snowfalls during some winters in recent years, but these have been isolated, extreme events rather than the evenly distributed precipitation of past winters.

 

Another way scientists assess the decrease in snowfall is by measuring how much snow is accumulated on the mountains, and how much of that remains for a period of time on the ground without melting: known as snow-persistence.

The 2024-2025 winter saw a 23-year record low of nearly 24% below-normal snow persistence, according to a report by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

It said four of the past five winters between 2020 and 2025 saw below-normal snow persistence in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region.

"This is generally understood to be consistent with decreased winter precipitation anomalies and snowfall in a significant portion of the HKH (Hindu Kush Himalaya) region," said Sravan Shrestha, senior associate, remote sensing and geoinformation with ICIMOD.

A study Singh with the IIT in Jammu co-authored and published in 2025 shows that the Himalayan region is now increasingly seeing snow droughts – snow becoming significantly scarce – particularly between 3,000 and 6,000m elevations.

"With snowmelt contributing about a fourth of the total annual runoff of 12 major river basins in the region, on average, anomalies in seasonal snow persistence affect water security of nearly two billion people across these river basins," the ICIMOD snow update report warns.

Melting Himalayan glaciers pose long-term water scarcity risks, while reduced snowfall and faster snowmelt threaten near-term water supplies, experts warn.

Experts say dwindling snowfall will impact the lives of millions of people in the region

Most meteorologists cite weakening westerly disturbances – low-pressure systems from the Mediterranean carrying cold air – as a key reason for reduced rainfall and occasional snow during winter in northern India, Pakistan, and Nepal.

They say in the past, the westerly disturbances brought significant rain and snowfall during winter, which helped crops and replenished snow on the mountains.

Studies are mixed: some report changes in westerly disturbances, while others find no significant shift.

"However, we know that the change in winter precipitation must be related to westerly disturbances, since they are responsible for the majority of winter precipitation across the Himalayas," said Hunt.

"We think two things are happening here: westerly disturbances are becoming weaker, and with less certainty, tracking slightly further northward. Both of these inhibit their ability to pick up moisture from the Arabian Sea, resulting in weaker precipitation," he added.

The Indian weather department has labelled the westerly disturbance north India has experienced so far this winter as "feeble" because it could generate very nominal rainfall and snowfall.

Scientists may sooner or later find out what is behind the decrease in winter precipitation.

But what is already becoming clear is that the Himalayan region now faces a double trouble.

Just when it is rapidly losing its glaciers and icefields, it has also begun to get less snow. This combination, experts warn, will have huge consequences.