From the perspective of climate policy, 2025 was not the year of grand new targets, but rather of practical implementation. At both European and national levels, the central question became how to make existing commitments operational through institutions, legislation, and financing. In parallel, adaptation gained increasing prominence: namely, how countries, regions, and communities can prepare for ever more frequent heatwaves, droughts, water scarcity, and energy market uncertainties.
Domestically, the focus of climate policy clearly shifted away from emission-reduction pledges toward vulnerability reduction and implementation. This paper reviews the key international, EU, and national decisions taken over the past year in this field—from global climate policy processes through maritime transport regulation, EU planning frameworks, and national adaptation programs, to constitutional and legal developments. The aim is not to rank commitments, but rather to illustrate how the practical implementation- and adaptation-focused face of climate policy evolved in 2025.
Throughout the year, the stance of major emitting countries toward climate protection continued to be marked by uncertainty. Although addressing climate change regularly appeared in political statements, long-term and predictable commitment often remained questionable. A striking example was the United States’ renewed withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, underscoring how exposed global climate cooperation is to shifts in great-power politics and domestic political dynamics. This did not mean, however, that 2025 lacked sector-specific regulatory decisions that tangibly strengthened implementation.
In maritime transport, 2025 can be considered a genuine regulatory milestone. From 1 January, the FuelEU Maritime Regulation entered fully into force, imposing greenhouse gas intensity reduction obligations on ships operating in the European Union and the European Economic Area, and clearly favoring lower-emission fuels. The gradually tightening trajectory—from a 2% reduction requirement in 2025 to up to 80% by 2050—remains technology-neutral while sending a clear market signal to the shipping sector. This trend was reinforced at the global level by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which in April 2025 approved the Net-Zero Framework. This introduces legally binding fuel emissions intensity limits and global emissions pricing elements for large seagoing vessels, effectively removing shipping from the group of climate policy “free rider” sectors.
At the EU level, one of the year’s most significant though less visible processes were the updated assessment of National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs). Supervised by the European Commission, the NECP framework has increasingly become an antechamber to post-2030 climate and energy policy. In Hungary’s case, the assessment painted a mixed picture: while the emissions reduction pathway for non-ETS sectors* appears achievable, or even over-achievable, on paper, the 2030 target for the share of renewable energy falls short of EU expectations, and energy efficiency commitments are only partially aligned with EU calculations. The planning framework is therefore in place, but the gap between ambition and implementation persists, according to the Commission.
Hungary’s climate policy in 2025 manifested primarily not through new emission-reduction commitments, but through the expansion of adaptation and implementation instruments. At the beginning of the year, the Rural Home Renovation Program was launched, making non-repayable grants of up to three million forints available to residents of settlements with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. Although not exclusively a climate policy instrument, energy efficiency upgrades such as insulation, window replacement, heating system modernization, or the installation of renewable energy sources—can indirectly reduce energy consumption and vulnerability to climate impacts. From spring 2025, the program was extended to pensioners living in small settlements, which is particularly relevant from the perspective of social vulnerability to heatwaves and fluctuating energy costs.
In the field of green infrastructure development, the National Afforestation Program continued over the past year, including the fifth phase of the Urban Tree-Planting Program. In 2025, a total of ten thousand roadside trees were made available to settlements with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, while the overall phase covers more than twenty thousand trees. Although such interventions do not significantly influence national emissions trajectories, at the local level they can help mitigate heat stress, improve microclimates, and support adaptation to the urban and rural impacts of climate change. The program’s effectiveness is illustrated by the fact that nearly 200 million new trees have been planted nationwide over the past few years.
Adaptation policy, however, has clearly focused on water management. The “Water into the Landscape!” program gained new momentum in 2025, placing water retention and the improvement of landscape water balance at its core. The concept breaks with the drainage-centered approach of recent decades, aiming instead to retain precipitation and inland waters locally where ecologically and economically justified. In several regions of the country, small-scale canal and reservoir developments were launched to mitigate the impacts of drought periods. At the same time, questions remain as to how effectively the program can address, in the long term, the legal and incentive barriers to involving private landowners.
In agricultural adaptation, extraordinary drought relief was introduced in the summer to mitigate the consequences of the severe drought of 2024. The rapid, non-repayable support primarily targeted smaller maize producers, providing short-term liquidity aid. From a climate policy perspective, however, this measure can be seen more as symptom management, once again highlighting that, amid increasingly frequent extreme weather events, preventive, systemic adaptation solutions—such as water retention, soil moisture protection, and changes in cultivation practices—are becoming ever more important.
In the summer of 2025, the constitutional dimension of climate policy came to the fore in Hungary. The Constitutional Court annulled the provision of the Climate Act relating to the 2030 target and found a legislative omission. The essence of the decision was not to weaken climate goals, but to state that, without concrete and enforceable instruments, a target alone is constitutionally insufficient. The ruling linked climate policy to the principles of intergenerational justice and precaution, creating a substantive legislative obligation to be fulfilled through 2026.
At the international level, the legal framework of climate responsibility continued to strengthen. In July 2025, an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice made it clear that states have international legal obligations to mitigate the impacts of climate change, reduce emissions, and prevent climate damage. Although the opinion is not legally binding, it provides an important reference point for future climate litigation and further shifts climate policy from the realm of political pledges toward legally accountable obligations.
The global climate policy year concluded at COP30 in Belém, where amid the partial or complete absence of several major powers (India, China, and the United States), the emphasis clearly shifted to implementation and the preparation for adaptation. Instead of new global emissions reduction targets, adaptation indicators, financing instruments, and concrete projects took center stage. In parallel, the European Union submitted its updated nationally determined contribution (NDC), writing down a net emissions reduction range of 66.25–72.5% by 2035. Although this indicative target is not legally binding, it provides an important political and investment signal for the post-2030 period. COP30 did not, however, close the year’s climate policy processes: at the national level, key decisions appeared precisely toward the end of the year.
Following COP30, in the final months of 2025, climate and energy policy in Hungary remained highly eventful, and the implementation-oriented approach reinforced internationally also became a guiding principle in national policy. End-of-year talks in Moscow and Washington indicated that energy policy decision-making was increasingly focused on securing and diversifying import sources, that is, maintaining security of supply.
At the same time, integrating rapidly expanding solar capacities into the system appeared not merely as a technical issue, but as a government-level policy task, requiring the preparation of solutions to increase system flexibility. In this context, a grant program of approximately 100 billion forints was announced, aimed at setting up energy storage capacities linked to solar generation. The spread of storage solutions can help smooth temporal fluctuations in production, ease grid constraints, and, in policy terms, open the way for the installation of further solar capacities.
By the end of the year, these developments aligned with the climate policy direction that became general in 2025, whereby the emphasis shifted from planning to action, and toward strengthening the conditions for system governance.
*EU Emissions Trading System – applies to large industrial emitters and aircraft operators, which in Hungary account for approximately one third of total greenhouse gas emissions.
