SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un toured coastal areas hit by a typhoon, and ordered 12,000 core party members to join the recovery effort on Saturday, while dismissing a provincial party chief, state media reported on Sunday.
North Korea’s state-run television KRT carried footage of Kim convening a meeting with North Korean officials and walking in the typhoon-hit area.
While Kim surveyed the damage caused by a typhoon that battered coastal areas last week, a tenth typhoon of the season was swirling in the East China Sea.
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said more than 1,000 houses were destroyed in coastal areas of South and North Hamgyong provinces and reported that farmland and some public buildings had been inundated.
Kim led an enlarged executive policy committee meeting on recovery efforts in the typhoon-hit areas, focusing on detailed measures such as organization of building crews to be dispatched to the areas, designs and material transport, KCNA said.
At the meeting, he also dismissed the chairman of the South Hamyong provincial party committee and appointed a new chairman.
North Korea’s ruling party had called for punishment of officials whose failure to follow orders results in “dozens of casualties” during typhoons, the country’s official party newspaper reported on Saturday.
Separately, Kim sent an open letter to party members in the capital noting that this year has witnessed “uncommon difficulties due to the protracted worldwide public health crisis” and natural disasters. It added that the Party Central Committee decided to dispatch 12,000 party members from Pyongyang to the typhoon-hit areas to help communities recover.
North Korea has been putting “practical measures” to minimize damage from the tenth typhoon of the season by informing people of locations of shelters and typhoon paths as well as how to respond and behave, KCNA reported.
The isolated country has been grappling with torrential rains, floods and typhoons in one of the wettest rainy seasons on record.
Typhoon Maysak smashed into the Korean peninsula on Thursday. In South Korea, it left at least two dead and thousands temporarily without power.
Typhoon Haishen is expected to hit South Korea’s southern tip on Monday, according to South Korea’s Meteorological Administration.
North Korea leader tours typhoon-hit area, directs recovery effort
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North Korea leader tours typhoon-hit area, directs recovery effort
- North Korea’s state-run television KRT carried footage of Kim convening a meeting with North Korean officials and walking in the typhoon-hit area
- Kim led an enlarged executive policy committee meeting on recovery efforts in the typhoon-hit areas
2025 among world’s three hottest years on record, WMO says
- All eight datasets confirmed that the last three years were the planet’s three hottest since records began, the WMO said
- The slight differences in the datasets’ rankings reflect their different methodologies and types of measurements
BRUSSELS: Last year was among the planet’s three warmest on record, the World Meteorological Organization said on Wednesday, as EU scientists also confirmed average temperatures have now exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming for the longest since records began.
The WMO, which consolidates eight climate datasets from around the world, said six of them — including the European Union’s European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the British national weather service — had ranked 2025 as the third warmest, while two placed it as the second warmest in the 176-year record.
All eight datasets confirmed that the last three years were the planet’s three hottest since records began, the WMO said. The warmest year on record was 2024.
THREE-YEAR PERIOD ABOVE 1.5 C AVERAGE WARMING LEVEL
The slight differences in the datasets’ rankings reflect their different methodologies and types of measurements — which include satellite data and readings from weather stations.
ECMWF said 2025 also rounded out the first three-year period in which the average global temperature was 1.5 C above the pre-industrial era — the limit beyond which scientists expect global warming will unleash severe impacts, some of them irreversible.
“1.5 C is not a cliff edge. However, we know that every fraction of a degree matters, particularly for worsening extreme weather events,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at ECMWF.
Burgess said she expected 2026 to be among the planet’s five warmest years.
CHOICE OF HOW TO MANAGE TEMPERATURE OVERSHOOT
Governments pledged under the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to avoid exceeding 1.5 C of global warming, measured as a decades-long average temperature compared with pre-industrial temperatures.
But their failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions means that target could now be breached before 2030 — a decade earlier than had been predicted when the Paris accord was signed in 2015, ECMWF said. “We are bound to pass it,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. “The choice we now have is how to best manage the inevitable overshoot and its consequences on societies and natural systems.”
Currently, the world’s long-term warming level is about 1.4 C above the pre-industrial era, ECMWF said. Measured on a short-term basis, average annual temperatures breached 1.5 C for the first time in 2024.
EXTREME WEATHER
Exceeding the long-term 1.5 C limit would lead to more extreme and widespread impacts, including hotter and longer heatwaves, and more powerful storms and floods. Already in 2025, wildfires in Europe produced the highest total emissions on record, while scientific studies confirmed specific weather events were made worse by climate change, including Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean and monsoon rains in Pakistan which killed more than 1,000 people in floods.
Despite these worsening impacts, climate science is facing political pushback. US President Donald Trump, who has called climate change “the greatest con job,” last week withdrew from dozens of UN entities including the scientific Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The long-established consensus among the world’s scientists is that climate change is real, mostly caused by humans, and getting worse. Its main cause is greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, which trap heat in the atmosphere.
