Serbia says 2024 was its hottest year ever

BELGRADE: Serbia marked the hottest year in its recorded history in 2024, the Balkan country’s meteorological office said this week.

The average surface air temperature last year was 13.3°C, “which is 2.3°C higher than the average for the period 1991-2020 and almost 1°C more that the previously hottest year – 2023,” the state hydro-meteorological service said in a report yesterday.

Globally, the United Nations’s climate and weather agency has said 2024 is set to be the warmest ever seen across the planet since records began being kept, capping a decade of unprecedented heat fuelled by human activity.

UN leaders and climate scientists blame global heating for a string of devastating floods, fires, heatwaves and hurricanes across the world in 2024.

Serbia was not spared, enduring a series of heatwaves in June, July and August.

The Serbian met office reported a record number of days when temperatures topped 35°C, the highest ever number of tropical nights, and the smallest ever number of frosty and icy days.

Physicist Irida Lazic said Serbia had been more like the Mediterranean than the Balkans last year.

“The temperature range in 2024 was typical for the coastal regions of Spain, Italy or Greece in the period 1961-1990,” Lazic, a member of the Physics Faculty in Belgrade wrote for climate website Klima 101.

According to data, “at the end of August approximately 92% of the territory of Serbia was affected by extreme drought”, she wrote.

In a sign of accelerating global heating, the met office report said all of the 10 hottest years in Serbian recorded history had occurred since the year 2000.

Of the hottest 20 years recorded, all had been in the 21st century except for 1994 and 1951.

The town of Negotin in eastern Serbia, known for its very cold winters, witnessed its lowest ever snowfall in 2024, just 2cm.

Several weather stations reported their fewest ever days of snow cover.

The 2015 Paris climate accords aimed to limit global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels – and to 1.5°C if possible.

Last year the average global temperature was 1.45°C hotter than before the industrial revolution, when humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization is set to publish the consolidated global temperature figure for 2024 in January.