The UK has almost no credible plans to adapt to climate change

Water and food shortages, power blackouts, telecoms failures, flooding and heat-related deaths: these are some of the growing dangers facing the UK because of its failure to adapt to a warming world, according to a highly critical report that looked at the country’s national adaptation programme over the past decade.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC), the official organisation that advises the UK government on cutting emissions and adaptation, identified a set of objectives needed to achieve climate resilience in 13 sectors such as nature, health and energy. The report found no credible plans for 40 out of 45 of the objectives, and that not enough is being done to implement any of the plans that exist.

“The last decade was a lost decade,” says Julia King, chair of the CCC sub-committee on adaptation. “The impacts are only going to get worse.”

The UK’s average annual temperature is already more than 1.5°C higher than in the 1880s, and it will keep on rising for many decades at least. The sea level has risen 15 centimetres over this time and will keep rising for centuries. “Every increment of temperature brings escalating hazards,” says King.

So much of the UK’s infrastructure and ways of doing things are no longer appropriate in the changing climate. This includes everything from houses not designed to cope with heatwaves to the crops farmers grow, power systems and flood defences.

The record-smashing heat in 2022 demonstrated some of the problems, says King. There were more than 3000 heat-related deaths over the summer, 20 per cent of operations were cancelled at the peak of the heat, train travel was disrupted by buckling rails and sagging power lines, drought led to water restrictions and reduced food yields, and fire fighters struggled to contain widespread wildfires.

“The events of last year highlight just how exposed and vulnerable we can be to extreme weather in the UK,” says Richard Millar, head of adaptation at the CCC. “It’s not enough to reduce greenhouse gases. We have to adapt as well.”

Water is one of the few areas where there are adequate plans for ensuring future supplies, he says, which include reducing consumption per person and cutting leakage. But water consumption per person has risen in recent years and little has been done to reduce leakage.

What’s more, the government’s adaptation programme not only needs to address specific areas such as water, says Millar, it also needs to take account of the increasing interconnectedness of infrastructure, which can lead to knock-on effects.

For instance, power failures due to extreme weather could lead to loss of water supplies and the loss of communication systems. The UK only narrowly avoided blackouts last summer.

Climate-related events elsewhere in the world can also affect the UK. There were shortages of some vegetables recently in part because of extreme weather in Morocco and Spain. “Identifying and managing these interdependencies is a key part of being climate resilient,” says Millar.

Some adaptation measures will be costly, such as upgrading the flood defences that protect London. But doing things now will be cheaper than “if we do it in a more panicked way towards the middle of the century”, says Chris Stark, head of the CCC.

“The change in the climate is a fundamental,” he says. Everything governments, companies and individuals do now happens in a warming climate, but this is still not being taken into account, he says.

The next five-year stage of the UK’s national adaptation programme is due to be announced later this year. It must be much more ambitious and focus on implementation, the report says, with adaptation embedded in all policies.

“We welcome the Climate Change Committee’s recognition of our progress so far and will factor its recommendations into our updated national adaptation programme,” a UK government spokesperson said.