Vegetation greenness in 2025

Piao, Shilong · Nature

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Climate chronicles

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 7, pages 209–212 (2026) Cite this article

Global mean vegetation greenness reached a record high in the year 2025, extending the multi-decadal upward trend. A total of 68.2% of vegetated land surfaces experienced greening, particularly in grasslands and croplands in the Southern Hemisphere and in northern mid-latitudes.

Key points

  • 2025 set a record for global vegetation greenness, steepening the global average greening trend from 8.1 × 10–4 yr–1 (2000–2024) to 8.5 × 10–4 yr–1 (2000–2025).

  • Herbaceous ecosystems dominated the 2025 greening signal, with 72.1% of grasslands and 77.6% of croplands exhibiting greening. Greening hotspots observed in southern Africa, southern South America, northern Australia, Europe, central North America and northern China align with precipitation increases.

  • 60.0% of forests exhibited greening, and this percentage is lower than what was reported in 2024. Notable browning occurred in eastern Siberia, driven by anomalously cold growing season temperatures. In tropical rainforests, conflicting signals from MODIS (browning) and VIIRS (greening) highlight uncertainties in monitoring canopy recovery following the 2023–2024 El Niño event.

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Fig. 1: Growing season vegetation greenness.

Subjects

Data availability

All supporting observation and model data are available as follows: the MOD13C2 data product is available at https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD13C2.061; the land cover dataset of MCD12C1 is available at https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MCD12C1.061; the VNP13C2 data product is available at https://doi.org/10.5067/VIIRS/VNP13C2.002; the temperature data are available through the ERA5 Land reanalysis dataset at https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.68d2bb30; and the precipitation data are available through the MSWEP dataset at https://www.gloh2o.org/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42588201) and the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2024QZKK0301) for support.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Carbon Neutrality, Sino-French Institute for Earth System Sciences, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Nazhakaiti Anniwaer, Dan Zhu, Yanchen Gui & Shilong Piao

  2. UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK

    Chris Huntingford

  3. Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Ranga B. Myneni

Authors

  1. Nazhakaiti Anniwaer
  2. Dan Zhu
  3. Yanchen Gui
  4. Chris Huntingford
  5. Ranga B. Myneni
  6. Shilong Piao

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dan Zhu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Anniwaer, N., Zhu, D., Gui, Y. et al. Vegetation greenness in 2025. Nat Rev Earth Environ 7, 209–212 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-026-00776-0

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