Environmental Audit Committee
Oral evidence: Extreme weather: heat, HC 254
Wednesday 3 June 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 3 June 2026.
Members present: Mr Toby Perkins (Chair); Julia Buckley; Barry Gardiner; Sarah Gibson; Chris Hinchliff; Sojan Joseph; Manuela Perteghella; Martin Rhodes; John Whitby; Sammy Wilson.
Questions 39-71
Witnesses
II: Professor Rowan Sutton, Director, Met Office Hadley Centre; Professor Lea Berrang Ford, Centre for Climate and Health Security, UK Health Security Agency; Professor Emma Howard Boyd, Professor in Practice, Grantham Research Institute, London School of Economics, and Chair, National Heat Risk Commission.
Witnesses: Professor Sutton, Professor Berrang Ford and Professor Howard Boyd.
Q39 Chair: Welcome to the second of our panel events today on the topic of extreme heat. We have another excellent panel in front of us. I will invite our panellists to begin by introducing themselves, the organisation they work for and their interest in the subject. I will start with Professor Howard Boyd. Will you introduce yourself, please?
Professor Howard Boyd: I am Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the National Heat Risk Commission that has just been set up, based at the London School of Economics. I led the London Climate Resilience Review for the Mayor of London, which we published in May 2024, and one of the key recommendations from that report was about heat risk. I would like to say a little more about that later on. Prior to that, I was chair of the Environment Agency.
Professor Berrang Ford: Hi. I am Lea Berrang Ford. I lead the UK Health Security Agency’s Centre for Climate and Health Security, which has been around for about three years. In a prior life I was a professor in climate and health at the University of Leeds. I am also a former author on the most recent IPCC—Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—assessment report, leading on global progress on adaptation.
Q40 Chair: Excellent. And Professor Sutton?
Professor Sutton: Good afternoon. My name is Rowan Sutton. I am a climate scientist and director of the Met Office Hadley Centre, which is the climate science division of the Met Office. I have been a climate scientist throughout my career and have worked in the academic sector most of my career. I have been a lead author at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example. The Met Office is an Executive agency of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Although it is best known as the UK’s national meteorological agency, it is also a world-leading centre for climate science and research.
Q41 Chair: I will start with you if I may, Professor Sutton. You mentioned your long history in climate science. To what extent has our scientific certainty on heat and the causes of increased warming developed over the last 10 to 20 years?
Professor Sutton: It is interesting to look back at that history. In the early days around the founding of the United Nations framework convention on climate change, there was already an understanding that the world was warming, but the causes were not fully established. Since that time, over the past 20 years or so, the evidence has become more and more irrefutable. The IPCC concluded well over a decade ago that warming of the planet was unequivocal. That is not just warming of the atmosphere, but warming of the oceans, the land, and the melting of the ice. We see it in all corners of the planet.
It has also been demonstrated in multiple IPCC reports that we can only explain the changes that we have observed globally as a consequence of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. To touch on points in the previous session, the current temperatures and the rate of warming are unprecedented in at least the last 10,000 years, which is essentially the history of human civilisation. We have established with compelling evidence that that is because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Q42 Chair: So you can say quite clearly and, as you say, irrefutably, as a climate scientist and someone who has studied this throughout your career, that there is no credible alternative conclusion than that man-made climate change is responsible. It is not simply a climate that waxes and wanes over the years, but is something quite different that we can be certain about.
Professor Sutton: That is correct, yes.
Q43 Chair: Can you tell us what the latest weather data tells us about the likely frequency and severity of heat periods in the UK in future?
Professor Sutton: I would be delighted to do that. The climate is warming. We are seeing warmer temperatures across the globe, but one point I want to emphasise is that extreme temperatures are changing particularly rapidly, and that is for reasons that are well understood. As the climate warms, temperatures at all levels increase. On what we observe and the likelihood of extreme temperatures—let me take the likelihood of 40°C in the UK, for example—the Met Office research has shown that the likelihood of a 40°C day in the pre-industrial climate was maybe one in 1,000, and probably quite a bit less than that. However, our estimate of the current likelihood is that it is about a one in 25-year event. That is a fortyfold increase in likelihood. We also observe that the magnitude of hottest days is warming faster than the magnitude of average days—about twice as fast in the UK. Seeing 40° in 2022 was a shock to many people, but I am afraid there will be more 40° days in the UK, and indeed that is not the limit. We can expect to see temperatures higher than that over the next decades.
Q44 Chair: In terms of what we heard earlier about aircraft taking off near to stations and so on, you do not dispute the fact that we saw 40° days.
Professor Sutton: No. The evidence on that is completely clear and validated by multiple independent stations, following the highest international standards, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.
Q45 Manuela Perteghella: My first question is to Professor Sutton. How do geographical features affect heat? Can you tell us a bit about how rural, coastal, inland and urban areas compare with each other?
Professor Sutton: The biggest contrast is between urban and rural areas. Generally speaking, during warm temperature periods, urban areas are warmer, often particularly at night. That is a consequence of the different materials and the proximity of buildings to one another. This urban heat island effect is very well established—there is a very large body of evidence about it—and it means that higher temperatures are typically experienced by people living in urban areas. It is not for every event—you can have exceptional weather events where that is not the case—but the biggest contrast is urban and rural.
Q46 Manuela Perteghella: This question is for the whole panel. Can you tell me how much of an impact the urban heat island effect has on temperatures in major cities? What is the impact on health?
I also want to know whether there is a danger of an over-focus on cities. I represent a rural constituency, and we have been asked to build lots of new houses and settlements, which will obviously have the features of an urban town. My farmers encounter heatwaves and face crop devastation. They are now planting hedges and trees again to give shade to their livestock, which are suffering. Could you tell us a bit about whether urban heat islands are just for major cities, or do you find them everywhere? How does that compare with rural areas?
Professor Sutton: Perhaps I can comment briefly and then hand over. Absolutely; I did not mean to imply that heat is not an issue for rural areas. It affects human health—I am sure my colleague will comment more on that aspect—and, as you say, there are many impacts on agriculture, in particular, which is of particular concern in rural areas. Heat is an issue across the land. The way it manifests and the particular impacts that we worry about most differ between different regions—between cities and rural areas, but also between different parts of the country, according to the different activities that people do and the lives they lead in different parts of the country.
Professor Berrang Ford: It is a really good question. The rural area risk is often underestimated, in terms of the heat impacts on health. Sometimes we have older population demographics, poorer housing quality and, as you have alluded to, higher-risk occupational exposures.
There is a north-south divide in the heat impact on health. Even though we see greater mortality due to heat in the south, mortality per capita is often highest in parts of the north. That is largely due to health inequalities, so there are really important drivers for health impact that are related to these social contexts, a number of which apply to rural areas.
To add to that, it is not just the absolute temperature to which people are vulnerable; it is also the change in temperature. It might be that we see health impacts earlier in communities in the north or in areas that are traditionally cooler, because health impacts tend to occur when you see these rapid changes and spikes in temperature. Even though an area might be rural, cooler and without heat island effects, you might see health impacts if it is not used to those temperatures and you see rapid changes.
Professor Howard Boyd: I will start by focusing on the 40° heatwave that we had back in 2022. Although my focus in the London climate resilience review was very much on London, the way we went into the heatwave and the other climate hazards that were manifesting themselves at the same time showed that this was a whole-country issue. We had had prolonged dry weather. As the temperatures started increasing, we saw an increase in water usage. It spiked by as much as 50% in certain areas of the country. As the temperatures went on to reach 40° in certain parts of the country, we also saw wildfires—in London specifically, a ring of fire all the way around London—and cascading impacts in terms of how our built environment and infrastructure were able to cope in those increasing temperatures.
The previous panel mentioned the hospitals that had to close. We also had railway lines where some of the metals used in the railway tracks were not built to be operational at 40° heat, so the connections between different parts of the country were shut down. We also had an issue about energy, and about lines sagging, which became a health and safety issue for train lines. We started seeing older infrastructure, much of which was built many years ago, starting to fail in 40° heat, because we did not build that infrastructure to the standards that withstand that heat.
So again, you just start seeing those impacts very quickly, whether related to energy supply, transport connections or water supply. Just last week or the week before, with the heatwave we experienced, we had impacts on water supply and transport links. That shows how this is affecting the whole country.
Q47 Manuela Perteghella: With the previous panel, we heard about the links between heatwaves and health issues, and of course excess deaths. We know that heatwaves trigger ozone pollution events, so can you tell us a little about the link between extreme heat and air quality or air pollution?
Professor Howard Boyd: Heat acts as a force multiplier to many of the issues that we have talked about, air pollution being one of them. Whereas in the city environment we have seen air quality being improved, during heatwaves and with the impact on ozone levels, we can see the undoing of the progress that has been made by reducing emissions in those cities. That is relevant to cities in the UK, but also around the world.
There is another force multiplier that comes across from an air quality perspective, but also from the perspective of health and the buildings that we live in. It is often the poorer, the most vulnerable, who are experiencing these different impacts hardest and are least prepared, which is why I commend the “A Well-Adapted UK” report for focusing on some of those parts of social infrastructure where we should be acting first.
Professor Sutton: I agree with the comments that Professor Howard Boyd has made.
Professor Berrang Ford: One area that some may not be aware of is that we do see spikes in thunderstorm asthma that are associated with extreme weather events. That is something we are starting to explore and is an emerging area.
Professor Howard Boyd: May I come in briefly again? I want to go back to a heat event that took place in, I think, July 2023, where we had a combination of heat, humidity, a pollen bomb and air quality issues. In London alone, there was a massive spike in admissions to A&E—to hospitals. All of those are things that, with the right combination of early warning systems, we can help people to be better prepared for, whether they are individuals suffering from asthma or health services gearing up for potential spikes in people needing hospital care.
Q48 Manuela Perteghella: Professor Berrang Ford, you talked about thunderstorm asthma. Can you clarify what you mean by that?
Professor Berrang Ford: We see spikes in asthma admissions to hospitals during thunderstorm events. This is not new, but it is a relatively recent area that we are exploring. The data is sparse; if you are interested in a follow-up, we could provide that.
Q49 Manuela Perteghella: Thank you. Professor Sutton, our predecessor Committee’s inquiry into heat resilience highlighted the importance of humidity and suggested incorporating it into more weather data and forecasts. Does the Met Office have any plans to do this?
Professor Sutton: Humidity is included in our forecasts and is available through the app, for example, so it is an integral part of our forecasting. It is an important factor in the heat health alerts, as my colleague will no doubt elaborate on. In terms of the extreme heat weather warnings that the Met Office issues, it is a factor that is taken into account when deciding whether to issue such a warning.
Q50 Sojan Joseph: If I can stay focused on the health side, we heard from the previous panel, and from some of your comments, that the elderly population is more vulnerable. Is it just the elderly population that is vulnerable to extreme heat and, if so, why?
Professor Berrang Ford: It is not just the elderly population, but they are probably the most vulnerable group. That is where we see by far the greatest mortality. Just to flag, it is also people with pre-existing conditions, which has overlap with the elderly. The elderly often have pre-existing conditions, such as cardiovascular and respiratory issues, and, importantly, mental health conditions or dementia.
We also see vulnerability among infants and young children; people with particular occupational exposure outside, such as construction and agricultural workers; low-income households; populations in institutional settings, including care homes—again, elderly people—prisons and schools; and those who are socially isolated. Again, elderly people in many cases are socially isolated.
What we see among elderly people is not only an increased biophysical vulnerability—the body’s inability to respond and deal with even small fluctuations in temperature—but an overlap with other risk factors, such as living alone and a higher incidence of pre-existing conditions. Things such as dementia can reduce people’s ability to understand when their bodies are changing temperature and to know when to seek help or take off a jumper, for example. Similarly, they may have less access to controlling their environment if they live in care homes, for example. Some medications can reduce the body’s ability to regulate temperature. There is a clustering of risk among elderly folks.
Incidentally, we are an ageing population in the UK, so regardless of increasing heat and temperature—the hazard itself—we are ageing into a more vulnerable period. One of the major drivers of risk is not just heat, but heat while we age into a more vulnerable group. We are also ageing while increasingly living alone, so we have this combination of factors moving us into a period of greater vulnerability.
Sojan Joseph: Professor Howard Boyd, do you want to come in?
Professor Howard Boyd: Yes—on two counts. First, another category of people who are affected by heat is pregnant women. On the same day that the “A Well-Adapted UK” report came out, the Wellcome Trust and others published a study into pregnancy in the UK and the increased number of risk days that pregnant women are now facing. At the same time, maternity wards may be overheating too.
One recommendation that the Wellcome Trust made was that the current national maternity and neonatal taskforce could look into this issue even more. While I agree that we need to do more work from an ageing perspective, there are also other categories; women and women’s bodies react to heat in a different way at different times.
We also need to focus on the issue of isolation and poorer conditions for people living in heat. One figure presented to me when I did the London climate resilience review was that in Hammersmith and Fulham alone, 18 lifts in social high-rise housing failed at 40° heat. Imagine if you are a parent with small children, if you are living with disabilities, or if you are elderly, and you are living in a high-rise building that is probably overheating, as well as having a lift that is no longer functioning. That just shows the cascading impacts that we are beginning to deal with and how the vulnerabilities layer in certain circumstances.
Professor Sutton: Thinking about the different environments that people find themselves in, the Met Office has done a number of studies, one with the Department for Education looking at heat risk in all the schools in the land. There is another study looking at heat risk in prisons. We need a lot more of those types of studies to quantify what is the magnitude and frequency of the events that we can expect, and what are adaptation measures that can mitigate those impacts.
Q51 Sojan Joseph: We heard that in 2022, there were about 3,000 deaths related to heat. What is the data saying? Are those numbers on the rise, especially in the UK and Europe? We also have parts of the world where the temperature is even higher and humidity is high—all of these problems exist. What is the difference? They are managing the death rates, compared with Europe. Is there any comparison with how they are managing it and why we cannot manage here?
Professor Berrang Ford: Good questions. There is not a silver bullet with greener grass on the other side. Others are struggling with the same problems that we have. I will answer your first question and then go to your second on the international comparison.
In terms of how things have changed since 2022, it was a relatively warm year in 2025. We saw half the number of heat-related deaths that we might have expected for those temperatures, so that was a period of potential success. The previous year, we saw more deaths than we potentially expected and that was a very mild summer. It is a bit of mixed picture, and we have only a few years of summer data to look at. The emerging indications are that people are adapting, or are more likely to adapt, to the amber alerts that are happening in the summer when heat is expected and when people have become acclimatised to a certain amount of warming.
Where we see excess mortality—where we as a society are less successful at adapting—is in out of season, or early and late season changes, even at yellow heat alerts. It will be interesting to see some of the results from the most recent heatwave in May because that was very early. These early sharp shifts, which are often happening when people do not expect them and when people are not ready for heat, seem to be where we are still getting those excess peaks.
It sounds like we may be having success in bringing down mortality and supporting populations during the more obvious heat events, but it is those boundary events. There are some highly vulnerable populations where even small changes can be quite impactful, so those yellow heat health events are really important. That gives you a bit of a picture of how things have changed.
Internationally, other countries are struggling as well. Probably the No. 1 thing that is different in the UK is a housing stock that is very old and not fit for purpose for Mediterranean Britain. It is also not the absolute temperature, but the temperature relative to what populations are used to, so the UK has not evolved behaviours and a culture of living in extreme heat, which could involve shifts all the way from things related to housing stock, such as having shutters on windows and being able to keep out not just the cold but the heat, to when people exercise and work during heat events; some countries have siestas, start early, finish work late or take a break during the day. As a society, we do not have that adaptation of behaviour. That combined with our housing stock are the two pieces I would pull out as some of the main areas of difference from other countries.
Professor Howard Boyd: This builds on what was just said about our housing stock and the built environment, and the fact that we are now living in a climate that our country was not designed for. The whole public communication and understanding of what we need to do differently needs to be communicated in many different ways. I am aware, for example, that Sports England has an ongoing project looking at how it can help individuals to understand how best to exercise in hotter climates, but also make sure that the built infrastructure for sports facilities is getting ready for our changing environment and climate. These are many different ways that we can get messages across to the general public about how to live in what has been described as a Mediterranean climate.
We have so much to learn from other parts of Europe, but we need to get right down to the nitty gritty design detail so that we can easily add shutters to the outside of our buildings, add shade and make sure that people living in rented accommodation can make the same adaptations that other countries are making, such as painting their roofs white. There is a whole range of different practical steps we can take, and we have to make sure that, when we go through heatwaves, the messaging around them shows how this is really difficult to live through for some individuals, rather than showing people eating ice creams and enjoying the sun. For some right now, it is incredibly miserable going through the sort of heat we experienced last week and the week before.
We have touched on many different Departments. I hope that part of your looking at heat will lead to an understanding of how different Departments are responding right now to their work and the focus on heat. While adaptation and resilience sits within DEFRA’s ambit, the levers sit in different Departments, so I am really keen to understand how many different Departments at the ministerial level have taken briefings from the Committee on the specific recommendations and positive steps that can be taken to make sure that we start preparing for heat.
Professor Sutton: I have a brief comment on the international perspective. We can of course learn from warmer countries, and need to do so, but climate is changing everywhere and every part of the planet is experiencing climate change that is taking them outside of the range that they are adapted to. They have to deal with new hazards—we have of course seen a lot of wildfire across the Mediterranean. Every country has its challenges; nowhere has the problem sorted at all.
Q52 Sojan Joseph: We need to raise awareness among the public not just two days before a heatwave but throughout the year. When you change your windows or your curtains that awareness needs to be there. We, as a community, have to be prepared for that heatwave, not raising awareness two days before it. I do not think that any of you have mentioned mental health. I worked in mental health for many years and I saw an increased number of admissions for aggression, agitation and suicidal thoughts in hot weather. Do you agree with that observation?
Professor Berrang Ford: Yes. The UK Health Security Agency published a special thematic assessment report on climate change and mental health last year investigating the growth in evidence in that exact area. You referred to an increase in episodes of violence during heat events. We do see that; there is evidence showing it. That includes domestic violence, suicides and a number of areas. Impacts on mental health go beyond that. One major area of impact is agricultural communities, which are already communities in transition that are strained. The particular causal link is flooding in that case; we see impacts on agricultural communities in higher rates of things such as suicide. There are also impacts on youth. We see concern among youth, although that is not specific to heat.
Violence is one case where heat is the causal link between climate or extreme weather and mental health. That includes—going back to this—elderly people in care homes. People with dementia are particularly susceptible to becoming more agitated with changes in temperature, for reasons that I previously discussed.
Professor Howard Boyd: The other area where I see a link to mental health is in research that I have been presented with around uniformed staff. Within the police, within the military, within the fire brigades, and even among care home workers, during those periods of heat the uniforms that those people wear cause rashes and other forms of discomfort that lead to them feeling very unhappy in their roles. I think that maximum workplace temperatures may help with how people feel physically during a heatwave and how they are able to dress and be cooled throughout that period. The duration of a heatwave and the nighttime temperatures—if they are not cooling and we are not sleeping—can also lead to other health impacts and safety impacts, particularly for people working with precision equipment, such as in construction or agriculture.
Q53 Sojan Joseph: My final question is to Professor Sutton. Can you explain the difference between adverse and extreme heat? At what temperature do these health conditions get worse?
Professor Sutton: I will answer initially, but I think my health expert colleague will probably have things to add. I will first give a little bit of context about heat warnings. The Met Office issues extreme heat warnings under a well-defined set of criteria for temperatures exceeding certain thresholds in certain parts of the country. Those warnings are based on an assessment of key impacts across a broad spectrum—for example, thinking about impacts on infrastructure or outdoor working. Separately, we collaborate with the HSA to issue the heat health alerts. The HSA issue them; we provide the weather data to inform those alerts and the details of how they are decided. I am sure my colleague can elaborate on the thresholds. I think because your question was about health I should pass over to her.
Professor Berrang Ford: We launched a new impact-based weather health alerting system in 2023. It takes into account not just temperature but other contextual factors, one of which—thinking back to some of the previous questions—is humidity. On your question about extreme versus adverse, “extreme” are temperatures that are much more on the edges. They are what it says on the label: very hot or very cold. “Adverse” is a reflection of the fact that even when you are not quite at the extremes, even moderate cold or heat can have impacts. “Adverse” reflects that they do not have to be extreme to have impacts.
That is important, because we see health impacts and increasing mortality at surprisingly low temperatures. Where a population may not feel that it is too hot or that it is pleasant, those might be what we call adverse temperatures—it is not extreme heat or 40°, but we start to see health impacts and mortality in vulnerable populations. That is the distinction between adverse, which is where we have things like yellow alerts moving into amber, and extreme, which might have amber alerts moving into red, for example.
Chair: Thank you. I am keen that we should try and speed up a little bit because we still have quite a lot to get through. I am grateful for the depth of the answers that we have had. It is our own fault for inviting three professors, but I am conscious of everyone’s time, so can we try and get through things a bit quicker?
Q54 Sarah Gibson: I would like to move us towards economic impacts. The first part of my question is to Professor Howard Boyd. In your view, what are the economic impacts of extreme heat, and which occupations are most at risk from it?
Professor Howard Boyd: We heard a little bit about this from the earlier panel. I think this is an area that still needs further work doing. In the London climate resilience review, a big part of the economic costs was linked to our transport and various services not being able to be used. Transport for London came up with a figure and we also have productivity dropping due to the heat and ongoing impacts. I am aware that, alongside a London heat plan, which the Mayor of London is due to publish this summer—probably later this month—there will be more economic analysis undertaken to split out the economic impact into different areas. Productivity loss is, from memory and from the work that we did for London, a large part of the overall impact of heat. I think that it is something on which more work needs to be done; in the way that we have had attribution science say that an event has been caused by climate, we would do rapid economic analysis, for example, on the impacts of the heatwave that took place last week. That kind of work will help us to understand the scale of the economic impacts that we are experiencing.
Q55 Sarah Gibson: Were there any particular professions or occupations that you would highlight, or do you think that more work needs to be done before we know the answers?
Professor Howard Boyd: I think that more work needs to be done. It absolutely might impact outdoor workers and people working in smaller businesses, particularly hospitality, where kitchens are hot already. We need to make sure that we are providing cooling solutions for those different organisations. I think that is where we need more work to be done.
Professor Sutton: On outdoor working, there was a Met Office study that estimated that if we get to 2°, we could be losing something like 15 million hours of outdoor work, costing around £1.5 billion. Transport and energy are also big sectors, because they have knock-on consequences for everything else, and of course there is also food and agriculture, as we were talking about earlier. Heat effects on crops and livestock is another area of work at the Met Office where there are significant concerns.
Q56 Sarah Gibson: Moving neatly on to food security, Professor Ford, have you done any research on the serious threat from heat in terms of future food security for the UK? Do you feel that we know enough about that?
Professor Berrang Ford: The “Health Effects of Climate Change” report that we published a few years ago included a chapter on food security. The UK remains highly dependent on food imports, and we are seeing a growing proportion of those imports from climate-vulnerable regions. That makes us particularly vulnerable to global climate shocks and potential disruptions. At one point in my local grocery store the entire produce section felt like it was empty, and there was a sign that simply said that that was due to unavailability due to flooding or extreme events in sourcing countries. Certainly, that exposure leaves us vulnerable and it impacts on agriculture within the UK, which is already in transition.
Q57 Sarah Gibson: There is quite a lot of evidence that a lot of the fruit and veg we import comes from west Africa, and that once they have lower productivity, they will prioritise their own consumption over exporting to us. Is that something that you are taking into consideration?
Professor Berrang Ford: That is not something that is within the primary remit of the work that UKHSA is doing at the moment. In the case of that report, we did a synthesis. But because its health impacts are much more indirect, it is partner colleagues in Government and academia who would lead that.
Professor Sutton: Global climate change as a driver of food price inflation is a massive issue. There is a specific project on that. There is a UKRI programme called Maximising UK Adaptation to Climate Change that is looking at that. It is a super-important issue. The consequences are obvious for vulnerable groups and others.
Q58 Sarah Gibson: Professor Howard Boyd, do you want to come in? Or was that the point that you were going to make?
Professor Howard Boyd: I think this is an area that was picked up by Baroness Batters in her review of farming in the UK and the importance of the supply chain. Given what we may see from overall food supplies around the world, food security will become an ever more important issue for this country.
Sarah Gibson: Thank you all very much.
Q59 John Whitby: The Climate Change Committee’s “Well-Adapted UK” report suggested that 92% of existing homes will overheat by the middle of the century without adaptation. How can passive cooling measures, such as the ones that Professor Howard Boyd mentioned—shutters, shading and insulation—be better publicised and incentivised?
Professor Sutton: Apologies, I might have to ask you to repeat that. From the beginning of your question, I thought that it was not for me, so I was just looking at something else.
Q60 John Whitby: The report suggests that 92% of existing homes will overheat by the middle of the century. How can we incentivise and publicise passive cooling measures, such as shutters, shading and so on?
Professor Sutton: That is a bit outside the remit of the Met Office, so it is perhaps not one for me to comment on, as I do not feel I have the particular expertise.
Professor Howard Boyd: May I come in?
John Whitby: Yes, of course.
Professor Howard Boyd: Sorry; I cannot see the Committee in detail, so I could not see whom you were aiming the question at. There are a whole range of different cooling measures that we should be prioritising and drawing attention to. In my time since publishing the London climate resilience review, I have been working with a great not-for-profit organisation called Shade the UK, and I would be very happy to send to the Committee a report it published that shows the range of different measures that you can put in place to cool your house.
Again, responsibilities around housing sit in many different Departments, so one thing I would like to see is how we can join things up. I am aware of work that is going on in flooding; I gave evidence on flooding to the Committee earlier this year or last year. When we look at upgrading our homes because a home has been flooded, we should also take that moment of retrofit and upgrade to think about all the other hazards we should be preparing for, but we tend to think about only one hazard at a time. I am also keen for the Department for Net Zero and Energy Security to focus on things you can do to upgrade homes from a renewables perspective, looking not only at energy efficiency but at future-proofing our homes from all these different aspects.
When—if you are lucky enough to do so—you buy or own a house, you upgrade your home only once and think about all these things together, so in how we join up our policies and incentives, we should be looking at making a home that is not only energy efficient and uses renewables but ready for the climate we are about to see. Where we see programmes around warmer houses, we should also think about cooling. This is where the insurance industry and the banking industry, through mortgages, could be doing far more to work with those who own their homes to upgrade them at the right time.
Professor Berrang Ford: I promise I will be brief. This is a good example of the challenge, because although the answer to this is well outside the health sector’s remit, health is highly influenced by decisions in other sectors, such as on what we do with our housing stock. It is a really important governance point that many of the levers that are important for protecting health, related to extreme heat, lie outside the health sector. I want to emphasise that.
Q61 John Whitby: Sticking with health, the Climate Change Committee also notes that we cannot always get to the position that we want to through just passive cooling, and that we may need to “prescribe” active cooling. Should we be doing or considering that?
Professor Berrang Ford: That is certainly already being done in some areas for people who are identified as highly vulnerable to cold. There are prescriptions in some councils for supporting heating, so it is certainly not unprecedented. We do not prescribe policy or tell folks how it is done, but it would certainly be an option, particularly given that we are talking about the focus of health impacts on specific, highly vulnerable populations and about being able to support them.
Also, where possible, we should slow or minimise a mass roll-out of such things as air conditioning. One of the really critical factors is that air conditioning is an adaptation that has significant potential to exacerbate inequality, because in many cases it is used through private adaptation. To ensure that air conditioning or active cooling is meeting the right people, more active policy mechanisms may need to be considered, and that could potentially be one of them.
Professor Howard Boyd: This is where cooling spaces come in, too. In the same way that we use different institutions—churches, sports halls and libraries—for people to meet to keep warm, we can open up some of our public spaces, including those owned by the private sector, to help people cool down. The British Film Institute has launched an initiative called “Cool Off in Culture”, where it works with cultural organisations and institutions across London by asking, “Does your building keep cool during heat waves? Can you open your doors, given that you have toilet facilities and catering facilities, for people to cool off during periods of intense heat?” These are the sorts of initiatives that we need to start getting ready for those extreme heat periods.
Q62 Martin Rhodes: Professor Berrang Ford, what are the implications for the public estate—schools, hospitals and care homes—of increasingly frequent and severe heat?
Professor Berrang Ford: I can speak only to the health effects. We would have the direct health effects. There is the occupational side, on which I would probably defer to HSE; they are not here to speak about that, but there is certainly the occupational side of things. In the public estate, schools, care homes and so on are settings where people often do not necessarily have control over their environment. It is quite a complex governance environment. In a school, for example, you might have occupational protections that might come through HSE, but also protections for children that might come from the Department for Education. The implementation of interventions to protect different individuals across these estates involves a whole number of organisations, in some cases in the same settings. This gets back to the point I made about the levers, and in many cases the solutions lie well outside the health sector. I do not think I have quite answered your question, so feel free to prod me on it, but some of it lies outside the remit of how far I can go.
Martin Rhodes: Professor Howard Boyd, do you have anything to add on the public estate?
Professor Howard Boyd: Yes. For example, back in February, the Education Secretary announced the “Education Estates Strategy: A decade of national renewal”. This is where there is an opportunity to look at the data we already have, both recorded and anecdotal, about how easy it is or is not for teachers to teach our children during periods of heat. Most of the heatwave took place during the half term that we have just had, but if you are teaching in a south-facing classroom in parts of the country, particularly in the south-east, you see that concentration levels become very difficult for students and teachers in those classrooms. This is where looking at the estate and at maximum working temperatures will allow progress to be made, hopefully at the pace that will allow students to continue to learn. We have also started to see calls for changing term times and exam times so that we give our children to best opportunity to learn through school and get the exam results they deserve.
Professor Sutton: Broadly, in all these environments, we need to understand the risks and then, of course, the adaptation options.
As for understanding the risks, the Met Office has a huge amount of climate data that can help to understand them. As I emphasised earlier—and will emphasise again now—the risks are changing really rapidly and we all need to get our heads around that, because it is not what people are used to. However, we have a lot of data that can quantify those risks and how rapidly they are changing.
The risk of course has the hazard part, which is the weather part that we think about, but then there are also the impacts. Professor Howard Boyd gave a number of examples earlier. Individual events that we have already experienced are a great opportunity to learn lessons about the impacts in these different environments. We then have to take that learning and work out how to make inferences for the whole country and future events, in order to assess which adaptation options will be most beneficial and actually do the job.
Q63 Martin Rhodes: Professor Sutton, you just talked about getting our heads around the risks. What more do we need to do to communicate the heat risk to the general public, particularly to those who may be more vulnerable? What could we be doing?
Professor Sutton: I am not an expert in public engagement and communication, and there is clearly not one answer to this question. The Met Office does a lot of work on the communication of weather warnings of one sort or another and of actions that the public can take to protect themselves, and then a lot of research on how effective that communication is. That is really important, but of course it is only one piece of the puzzle.
Regarding the adaptation piece, mechanisms such as citizens’ assemblies were mentioned earlier; I think those are super useful as tools to engage broader populations. But as I say, I am not an expert in public communication and engagement. We certainly need to do a lot more.
Q64 Martin Rhodes: Professor Berrang Ford, do we need public information campaigns?
Professor Berrang Ford: Yes, but if we think about where people are dying, it is often in institutional settings, so public engagement is not necessarily the most appropriate mechanism for those. In care homes and hospitals, support and communications will need to cascade through institutional channels and not necessarily through the general public. Absolutely, we must communicate with the general public, but I want to flag that it is not just about mass communication.
There is also the risk of “nanny state” accusations—“It’s only 23°. I am enjoying this. Why are you telling me that this is a risk?”—so we have to be really careful about targeting our communications. That is where behavioural sciences are really useful. At UKHSA, we have a fantastic behavioural sciences team who we are trying to work with to think about how to tweak the messages for maximum effect and for which audiences. We can have real levers to protect people.
Professor Howard Boyd: I think that some of the messaging that came out of the “Well-Adapted UK” report about protecting the things that we love and love doing is one way of really making that targeting clear, so that we are using ways—whether at community or local authority level—of getting through to people the need to look after our friends, family and neighbours. I say that because I still think that, although it is it is correct to say that some people are worried about nanny state-ism, we also need to make it clearer which parts of our community are at risk, so that we are protecting them and acting in the right type of way. Again, we should be using different channels. I have talked about sports. I have talked about other cultural institutions weaving stories of heatwaves and how people are vulnerable during them, which is another way of getting messages across.
The other thing that I am really interested in exploring more, where it has been trialled, is the naming of heatwaves.
That has been done in a couple of instances at a city level, where the mayor has wanted to make sure that they are protecting their community from heatwaves. We have seen research in this country that, certainly from an Environment Agency perspective, when a named storm and floods coincided the messaging to the general public was massively elevated.
As this is so new for us in this country, we need to be very imaginative about how we communicate at different levels. I will be watching with interest when the Mayor of London launches the London heat delivery plan. I hope that it will cut through to Londoners and visitors to London, so that people know, the next time we experience a heatwave—probably this summer—some of the steps that need to be taken both in the initial circumstances and longer-term steps.
Q65 Martin Rhodes: Naming heatwaves was a suggestion made by the predecessor Committee. The Met Office decided not to take that forward but to keep it under review. Is it still under review?
Professor Sutton: It is. The academic evidence on the benefits of naming heatwaves is not super clear. We have seen a lot of benefit from naming storms—I totally agree with Professor Howard Boyd on that. Heatwaves are not like storms. They have some similarities, but they have some real differences. There is no internationally agreed approach here, which we do have on storms, and that is super important. It is very much under review. There are some significant attractions, but also some downsides. That is the current position.
Q66 Manuela Perteghella: My question is to Professor Berrang Ford. What has been the learning since the introduction of the adverse weather and health plan in 2023 and how is that incorporated into subsequent iterations of the plan?
Professor Berrang Ford: The adverse weather and health plan brought together the previous heat and cold plans for England. It is quite a developed framework that actively sets objectives, leads guidance and is tracked. On a regular basis, we have evaluated the plan. Every year, it is updated with additional information. We did an equity assessment, I believe, last year.
Some of the learning might be around increasing emphasis on new vulnerable groups and advice on adjusting guidance to increase accessibility to some different groups. I could probably go on forever about this, but every year, it is assessed to the extent to which it actually has impacts and then the guidance is cascaded across this network that the plan supports and communicates with.
Q67 Manuela Perteghella: Is there any best practice and are there lessons to be learned from the UK response to flooding, and how it interacted with communities? I represent a community vulnerable to flooding, and we have flood action groups, flood wardens and regular meetings with stakeholders such as the Environment Agency. Can that be done for heatwaves?
Professor Berrang Ford: The adverse weather and health plan certainly integrates different hazards. It is a part of the system that we are trying to have learning across the two. Heat is very different from flooding. Flooding is highly localised and driven by local infrastructure, be that green space, housing or surface conditions, whereas heat does tend to be more spread out. So some of the response and early warning and interventions are very different, but you are absolutely right that the adverse weather and health plan provides a mechanism, where possible, to get that cross-fertilisation of learning.
Professor Howard Boyd: This is where we have a lot to learn from other countries that have been experiencing heatwaves longer than us. You see different examples—different cities and different areas coming up with heat plans and there are chief heat officers. It is about putting in the governance arrangements.
The Environment Agency is very much part of local resilience forums. Are heatwaves being discussed in those mechanisms today? Do we need to look at the governance arrangements for other hazards and see what the equivalent is for heat, and how other levels of Government, such as local government and combined authorities, can up what they are doing to get better prepared?
This is something that needs urgent attention at all levels of Government to get right, particularly in those areas experiencing heatwaves more than other parts of the country.
Q68 Manuela Perteghella: Finally, what role can green and blue infrastructure play in cooling in cities and in new settlements in rural areas? Can there be any unintended consequences?
Professor Berrang Ford: That is a great question. Green and blue space or what is sometimes called nature-based solutions is a real potential what we call co-benefit, meaning that, serendipitously, there are a lot of opportunities for multiple health benefits to come from interventions related to green and blue infrastructure. There is cooling through shading—you already mentioned that; improved air quality; and there is evidence of improved mental health benefits.
To the second part of your question, we do have to be careful about how those interventions are done. One example that we are quite interested in is ensuring that we are not doing greening without considering the implications that that might have on vector-borne disease risk, which is also a climate-sensitive health risk. We have to be really careful that we are not solving one problem while creating another. I could talk for a whole inquiry about vector-borne disease risk, so please invite me back on that topic.
There is also one other small example in increased planting and green space. We have to be a little bit careful that we are not creating new opportunities for pollen, which could have implications for air pollution and respiratory implications.
There is great potential opportunity for co-benefits, but we just have to be a little careful about how they are designed.
Professor Howard Boyd: From a climate perspective, as well as from the health perspectives that have just been described, there are many different benefits. That can be creating sponginess for flooding; rain gardens and tree gardens are both great for shading as well as carbon sequestration; and some plants will help with air pollution issues.
From a negative perspective, we have to be really careful that we are maintaining those green spaces, particularly those with increased fire risk, and that we are making sure for those communities on the edge of urban environments that we understand the buffers that will be required if we see some of the wildfires that we are seeing.
It is about making sure that we are doing the designs for green and blue infrastructure in conjunction with our colleagues who are responsible for wildfire risks—the fire brigade and others like Natural England—but it is also about ongoing maintenance, so that what was initially put in with great intent can be maintained over a period of years, both for the flood benefits, but also for the heat benefits. That has to be got right too.
Q69 Chair: Professor Berrang Ford, as we head towards the Government’s fourth national adaptation programme, what are the key elements we need to see within that in order to ensure it is a stronger document than the widely criticised third version?
Professor Berrang Ford: I concur with one of my colleagues on the previous panel, who spoke about clearly articulating what our ambition is and what we think we can actually achieve. As has been discussed, there are obviously a huge number of trade-offs and—a lot of this is a political decision—we need to decide where we want to land in those trade-offs vis-à-vis what our ambition is and what we can achieve, given the benefits and the costs.
Clearly articulating what our ambition is so that we can develop targets and consider feasibility is the No. 1 piece that would be great for clarity. I have found it helpful to articulate aiming for preparedness to adapt to the health impacts of 2° by 2050, and to consider, be ready for and understand the implications of impacts associated with 4° by 2100, so that we are beginning to provide some framing for how we can think about what we are preparing for, and scaffolding ambition on to that.
Q70 Chair: Professor Howard Boyd, I saw you nodding along to Professor Berrang Ford in terms of the high-level priorities. Are there any specifics you would like to see within the adaptation programme?
Professor Howard Boyd: Leading on to understanding the investment and how we unlock the private sector, I am aware of an initiative based at the London School of Economics and led by the Grantham Research Institute with the Environment Agency, the Green Finance Institute, Paul Watkiss Associates and other universities. They are designing an adaptation investment framework, which includes some of the things that Professor Berrang Ford talked about in terms of that ambition, but also the targets and standards that will unlock investment from the private sector.
I go back to the point I made earlier that the insurance sector and the banking sector are increasingly understanding these risks and are increasingly putting money on the table for the Chancellor’s initiatives to raise money for infrastructure. They, knowing those risks, should also be more muscular about asking for the right policy framework that catches not just heat risk, but flood risk and subsidence risk. Then we can start investing in our infrastructure, social housing and the other things we have been talking about in a way that is confidently preparing for the climate and we know is locked in.
Q71 Chair: Professor Sutton, is there anything you would particularly call for in the adaptation programme, and are there any additional areas of research that you would like to see prioritised? Is there anything we do not know in this area?
Professor Sutton: I guess a cross-cutting point is that the adaptation and the risk assessments that precede it need to be done using the best possible data. We are blessed in this country to have a wealth of high-quality data, but the whole area of climate services is developing fast and standards are not always consistently high. There is a need for standards in that area to help the private sector get the data and information it needs in order to have confidence that investment decisions will be based on appropriate risk assessments. That is a cross-cutting need.
In terms of research gaps, obviously we are focusing today on heat. There are aspects of heat in urban areas that we still need to understand better—the interaction between individual heat events and the building stock, for example. We understand that these events are generally worse in urban areas, but the details can really matter. I will leave it there.
Chair: Professor Berrang Ford, Professor Sutton and Professor Howard Boyd, thank you very much for a tremendously detailed and insightful session. Thank you all for your contributions. I will bring the sitting to a close.