How The 2025 Hurricane Season Ignited Climate Injustice Claims

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NASSAU, BAHAMAS – The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season officially ended on Sunday, and it will likely be remembered most for Hurricane Melissa, whose destructive path tore through Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti before brushing the southern Bahamas.

In this week’s Sustainability First, we look at how the season reignited global conversations about climate injustice.

November 30 marked the close of the season, which produced 13 named storms, five hurricanes, and four major hurricanes, slightly below Colorado State University’s preseason forecast of 17 storms and nine hurricanes. But the real story wasn’t the storm count; it was the sheer power behind them.

Three of this year’s hurricanes, Erin, Humberto, and Melissa, rapidly intensified into Category 5 systems, a level of activity not seen since the historic 2005 season. These major hurricanes were long-lived and intense, with Melissa becoming one of the strongest landfalling hurricanes on record when it struck southwestern Jamaica on October 28.

With monster storms like Melissa and 2019’s Hurricane Dorian becoming more common, leaders of small island nations say the trend highlights a growing climate injustice: countries that contribute the least to global emissions continue to suffer the most severe impacts of climate change.

The issue has also caught the attention of the United Nations. Earlier this year, during a CARICOM summit in Barbados, UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the inequity, saying small nations are facing “a crisis they have done next to nothing to create,” while larger polluters fail to curb emissions.