Welcome everybody to the latest meeting of the Environmental Audit Committee. Today’s one-off session is on extreme heat, which is very timely given the week or two that we have just been through. We have two different panels before us today. For the first panel, we are delighted to have with us Dr Richard Millar from the Climate Change Committee and Professor Swenja Surminski from the Adaptation Committee. Thank you for being with us. Can you introduce yourselves and describe your roles in the committees you are on, particularly as they appertain to heat?

Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this important topic. Today I represent the Climate Change Committee, where I serve on the Adaptation Committee and the Mitigation Committee. For full transparency, I also work in the private sector; I work for Marsh, a leading insurance and risk management advisory firm that works a lot with public and private sector organisations on complex risks, including climate. I am also a professor in practice at the Grantham Research Institute at the LSE, where we do a lot of research on adaptation and climate risk, but also more recently on the macroeconomic case, working with the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action.

Good afternoon. I am Dr Richard Millar, the head of adaptation in the Climate Change Committee. I lead the secretariat’s work that produces and supports the Adaptation Committee, which Professor Surminski sits on and is chaired by Baroness Brown.

Dr Millar, we have just experienced the hottest May Day ever recorded in the UK, and there are reports that a super El Niño could lead to further record temperatures globally over the coming year. What do you think the latest data tells us about the likely frequency and severity of excessive heat periods in the UK in future?

The evidence is very clear, and is documented in both our report, “A Well-Adapted UK”, and the supporting technical report. The UK’s climate has already changed in terms of heat—we are seeing hotter and more frequent heatwaves today. If we take the future and what is coming over the next few decades, particularly the few decades out to 2050, we know that summers will be hotter and the extremes that we will see will be more intense and more frequent. In particular, we know that the possibilities of reaching temperatures as high as those we have already seen in the UK, such as the 40° warming that was seen for the first time in July 2022, will become more likely as we go towards the middle of the century. In the hardest heatwaves, temperatures could reach even higher levels—maybe around 43° or possibly even higher. We know that these temperatures have big impacts on people’s productivity, comfort and, critically, their health. In the heat of summer 2022, we saw about 3,000 or so excess deaths across just England and Wales connected to that heat. If you were to take that forward into the middle of the century, those heatwaves might lead to something more like severalfold that figure—even as much as 10,000 in some of the worst years.

How far back do the statistics go? It is being said that we are now hitting records; how accurately can we say that there is a historic comparison with that?

In the UK, I think we can say that. The UK is one of the areas that has been measuring its weather and climate for the longest, led by the Met Office, which I know you will hear from in the next panel. I think we have a good understanding of what we have seen, most particularly over the recent decades. If we were to look globally, the vast majority of the warming that we have seen, which is about 1.4° above what was a proxy for pre-industrial periods, has happened since the 1970s or so. We have a pretty good observational record over that period domestically and increasingly internationally, so we have a compelling picture that climate statistics are changing and will continue to change into the future, in the decades ahead.

Some would make the case that, if you go back over hundreds of years, there have been variations in temperature, and, as a result, they suggest that this is all overblown. Is there any credible scientific evidence that all we are living through is a natural warming and that this is all being misrepresented? Has that been debunked to the extent that no scientist could credibly say that now?

We have an increasingly good understanding of exactly how the effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere change the weather globally. We know that, for example, even just a few decades ago there would have been a very small probability of seeing 40° heat due to natural variations—that was almost on the edge of being impossible. Today we think that probability has changed. Now, in a typical year, there is about a 4% probability of seeing temperatures that high or even higher. Some of the estimates from the latest Met Office science suggest that, over the next decade or so, there might be something like a 50/50 chance of seeing a day that hot again. We are increasingly seeing those changing statistics, and we understand both from the physics of it and from the direct observations that this is due to the increased loading of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Professor Surminski, is the warming that we are seeing in line with what we were expecting 10 years or so ago? Is it escalating faster or going slower than we thought?

Simply put, global temperatures are tracking in line with what the model has been predicting. Where the surprising element comes in is the extremes, particularly some regional extremes. Most scientists were surprised to see the speed of how such extremes play out. For example, Europe is the fastest-warming continent, at 0.53° per decade, which is more than the global average. Looking at how that plays out and what it means in record-breaking heat extremes, those are often outpacing climate model projections. In a way, the models have been underestimating the impact of the observed changes. That is very concerning, particularly when we talk about the impact not only on health, infrastructure and businesses, but on the natural environment.

Dr Millar touched on 2022, when as many as 4,500 people died from heat-related causes—I think you said 3,000 excess deaths in comparison with what we would normally expect. What analysis do we have of what to expect by 2050 or so, if we continue to see such growth in temperatures?

We have started to touch on the health side. As the heat becomes more frequent and more intense, our levels of mortality now, which might be a few thousand, as you say—up to 3,000 or so in some of the worst years—could have a severalfold increase. Climate change is part of that. Also, the population getting older might make a contribution. There are increasing challenges in the load of this heat on people’s lives—often the most vulnerable people, whether the elderly or those in ill health, are most at risk from this heat—and in the increasing load on what is called the morbidity from heat, meaning that presentations of other health-related conditions could potentially cause something like a tripling of A&E attendances connected to extreme heat. That might be particularly concentrated in, say, the south of England, but also across the country. If I may, Chair, this might be a good opportunity to ensure that we are clear that, when we talk about rates of change, our advice about the levels that we need to prepare for is based on what are plausible trajectories for current emissions; it is what countries are signed up to. Our analysis does not depend on the super-high levels of greenhouse gas emissions that continue globally to grow much higher than they are today. That has been taken out of the most recent set of scenarios used by the academic community. The potential to reach 2° around the middle of the century is seen across those scenarios, and plausible planning for 4°, or up to 4°, by the end of the century is still an outcome that we need to consider at the top end of the scenarios for a prudent risk assessment, which is what we are tasked to do by the Climate Change Act.

There has been considerable debate about trends in temperatures and so on, and about past temperatures that have impacted on the United Kingdom, going back even to the Roman period, when as far north as Scotland, it was warm enough to grow grapes and make wine. Today’s levels are not unprecedented historically. You mentioned the rise over the past century, but do you not agree that we started from a fairly low base, at the end of a cooling period towards the end of the 19th century? By how much have temperatures risen between then and now?

Globally, we have seen about 1.4° of warming, but a lot of the challenge comes with the rate of warming, which we think is a record rate. It is warming at about 0.25° per decade globally. In Europe, and western Europe, as Professor Surminski said, we see those heat extremes changing very rapidly. A lot of the challenge that our report speaks to is about how we deal with that speed of change, when we have infrastructure, housing and societal systems designed for what we saw in the past century—in the 20th century—but we know that that climate is not the one that we have anymore, and the one that we will have in a few decades will be changed again. That 40° is a good example. Our best estimates indicate that that was on the edge of being impossible due to the natural fluctuations in weather even a few decades ago. Now, we expect to see that in maybe 4% of years, typically.

You mentioned the 40° one in July 2022. Of course, there has been considerable debate about what caused that. It was measured at an RAF station as three Typhoon jets were taking off. Many people said that the spike was caused not by natural temperatures but indeed by what was happening on the site. Indeed, there have been others at Heathrow and Charlwood, etc. Are you happy that the information you are getting is accurate? Given some of the comments that have been made about the quality of the Met’s sites—I think 80% of them fall into the category where there can be variation of between 2° and 5°.

What is striking about the 2022 heat is the spatial extent of it. It was over a large bit of the country where temperatures were very high—in the very high 30s or at 40°. It was a really large swathe of the country that extended down from Lincolnshire. It was even very hot in Yorkshire through to the south-east. The pattern in the spatial extent of that heat gives us confidence that that was one of the very hottest events we have seen in an individual day in this country.

Even the class 1 and 2 weather stations did not show the same that year. They are the ones that are going to give you the more accurate information. I think class 1 is the one that is used as a base. They did not show the same extent. It was in the other 80%—the class 3, 4 and 5 stations—that most of those higher temperatures were recorded. I do not think that there is evidence of warming. All I am saying is that if we are going to make policies on the basis of data, surely we would expect that data to be accurate, and not, as the World Meteorological Organisation has said, based on 80% of stations not meeting their standards for accuracy. Is that a worrying factor for you in feeding into your decisions?

It is absolutely important that we make decisions based on good-quality data. This is a good example of where there is a confluence of what we have seen across the observational record and in interpreting the stations in the right way, and then a mixture of an understanding around the fundamental physics of how additional carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere should affect those kinds of heat waves, as well as a good understanding from the complex models that try to simulate that. They all point in the same direction. It is that combination of lines of evidence that gives us confidence that heat is changing already, and will continue to change in the decades ahead, and that it is prudent to plan on that basis.

At the launch of the report last week, Baroness Brown made a very startling statement: children who are sitting exams, or indeed adults who are sitting exams, are 10% more likely to fail if they are sitting them at 32° rather than 22°. I think that is what she said. What are the key messages of the “A Well-Adapted UK” report on adapting to the heat that we expect to have to face? What are those key messages that we need to drive through?

One of the key points that we set out in the report is that the UK has been built for a climate that no longer exists. That in itself is a really important statement. It shows in stats, as you were saying, in terms of overheating in schools, which then has implications for performance. It shows in hospitals and in our infrastructure. In our transport infrastructure we often we see delays caused by extreme weather. It is this statement that what we are dealing with today were seen even a few decades ago as freak, outlandish events, but they have become more regular. That is the starting point for considering how we can factor this into our procedures, including planning rules and building regulations, as well as how we operate in the private sector, such as certain working procedures and time procedures. One suggestion was that exam seasons could potentially be rescheduled. We need to think creatively about how we can cope with this new normal, and how we can do that quickly, to avoid these significant impacts.

Let us look at vulnerability. Dr Millar talked about the number of excess deaths as a result of heat, and we know that in care homes, heat stroke is an important factor. Of the things that this report tells us we should be doing, what are the key priorities? I would like you to focus not only on vulnerability, but on inequality—for example, around who has environments with air conditioning. Let’s talk about those children sitting exams: if you have air conditioning in your bedroom at home and you have somewhere to do your revision, that’s great, but if you have not been able to get to sleep for 10 nights in a row because the heat is so high, you will go into that exam exhausted, with all the stress that that brings. Inequality and vulnerability have to be key in how we approach adaptation. I commend the report, which I thought was brilliant. But it is huge—I have read the executive summary, but I have still not gotten through the report. Could you pick out those priorities for us?

Before Dr Millar goes into the details, to illustrate why we published the report in this way, we felt that the understanding of the risks and the gaps in our responses was really clear, but it was less clear what the objectives and targets should be now, and what a well-adapted UK actually looks like. It is quite hard to define, and it can be quite a personal experience how well-adapted you might feel compared with someone else—the vulnerability aspect comes in. The report tries to be an evidence-based and accessible document that sets out key objectives across 14 different sectors that state what we need to achieve collectively, and also tries to appoint ownership, which I think is really important.

You are telling me process, but I want detail.

Yes, and you get the examples, but it is important because we have never had that before.

It is solutions based and it has changed the lens—I get that.

Yes, exactly.

To pick up on Professor Surminski’s point, we have several priorities on heat. The top one, which is almost stage zero, is to set an ambition for this. We think that it is credible to have, within the national adaptation plan, an ambition for keeping heat-related deaths at a level that is at least no higher than that of today, and is potentially lower. We have good evidence that it is cost-effective, in terms of the mixture of health and built-environment interventions, which include a range of cooling, to be able to do that. On the specifics of Government moving this forward, there is a good case for investing in cooling for public services and buildings. That is about investing in hospitals to make sure that they are at safe temperatures, and in schools in the most at-risk areas to ensure that they are at sustainable, safe temperatures that are conducive to the things that students and teachers do in them, such as exams. It is also about understanding that cooling will be needed in the building stock—in people’s homes and offices—which can take a variety of different forms. In the public sector, there is a clear role for Government in helping to facilitate and fund that. Beyond that, we have a couple of recommendations that try to scale this up in other areas. One is to establish national regulations for maximum temperatures in workplaces, which, again, you can see in other countries—for example, Spain has it. We have equivalents on low temperatures. Again, that is to provide safety guidelines for workers, but also to help provide the incentives.

We are doing it in the World cup, aren’t we? We are giving them extra breaks instead of just a half-time break.

Yes. These will not be uniform, across-the-board, blanket rules. They will change by indoor or outdoor work and by sector. There are pragmatic incentives that can help businesses invest in their own workplace resilience. The final one picks up your point circling back to vulnerability. We know a lot of this, particularly when you think about the health impacts, is concentrated in a particular group, or groups, in the population. Where those are particularly vulnerable, and maybe have low incomes, there is a case—which we recommend in the report—that Government should be looking at how they can accelerate the uptake of cooling for those groups. Also, thinking about existing schemes that target those groups around low-carbon heat, for instance, and whether there are join-ups around, if you are replacing heating systems with low-carbon heating, that they equally do cooling with reversible heat pumps in situations where that might be appropriate, as just one example.

Are there critical systems that are heat vulnerable and could lead to cascading risks?

Yes, I think there are. Cascading risk is something that comes up across the report. In terms of some of the most critical ones, we are already very reliant on our power system and on electricity, and as we electrify further that will only increase. We need to make sure that as that electricity grid is invested in and built out—and as we move towards the zero-carbon power system that we are trying to track towards—that the assets that are chosen to be the right assets can deal with the kinds of heat stresses that we might expect in several decades when they might still be in place. That is a good example.

What happens if our electrical power system is subject to too much heat? Give us the examples. What are those cascading risks and how would it then play out?

There are several bits to that. One is that you can see spikes in demand happening around times of heat. You also see sagging of power lines, which will reduce the efficiency of the grid to transport the system. Where disruptions do happen, you also see potential for those effects to cascade. A good example might be from a few years ago when we lost power to electrified rail lines and people could not get off the trains and were in very hot trains for a long period.

Potentially you would have outages that present further risks down the system?

That is right. Again, taking a healthcare angle and looking to that heat in 2022, we feature in the report the heat-related failures in data centres that served two of London’s biggest hospitals, which caused weeks of disruption for patients.

Does action now to prevent those risks, which are real risks to all our lives, save money?

Yes. Our analysis shows that the cost of inaction is far greater than taking action. It is really important to have a clear view on what the priorities are now versus over 10 or 20 years. For the first time in this report, we also started costing some of those adaptation actions. That is a really important element of the analysis because it is not going to happen automatically. We need to build a case. Importantly, the case is always most cost effective when we build something new and integrate it. That is not rocket science. That should just be part of any new infrastructure. Any new buildings should be designed in view of today but also, more importantly, the future climate. That is a really cost-effective aspect. We have a costing, and our analysis shows that implementing all the additional actions that we lay out would need, I think, on average £11 billion of investment per year to meet that 2050 target.

You mentioned adapting and then went straight on to talk about air conditioning. Spain has a serious problem in that more electricity is used to cool buildings than everything else put together, including industry. Going down the route of air-source heat pumps, which—let’s face it—were air conditioning units 30 years ago, and putting them into homes, seems really dangerous. I apologise that I have read only part of the executive summary. Is there not an argument more along the lines of adapting to a hotter climate, which is what some of our European neighbours are trying to do? France is considering moving the academic timetable to finish at the beginning of May and come back earlier in the summer—that sort of thing—rather than just suggesting that we throw air conditioning at it, which is just not going to work.

The report suggests that the answer is all of the above. It is absolutely the things you mentioned there, but it is cooling, too. Cooling is through different routes. There is a mixture of more passive measures, such as shading and ventilation that can deal with the challenge in some building types. When we look into the future, around the kind of severity of heat we are dealing with, peaking in the mid-40°s instead of 40°, as we have seen in the past record, as one example, you can be clear in dealing with that kind of heat to keep critical settings for people who are particularly vulnerable to heat. There will be a need for increasing active cooling done in the right way in certain settings as part of that. To circle back to your question on energy, that is an important bit of thinking about cooling. We have factored that into our work across both sides of the committee, in terms of our advice on the seventh carbon budget, for instance. We think the scale-ups we are talking about, in terms of UK electrification, is a more than a doubling in electricity demand. We think cooling is about 1% of that. It could play a potentially useful role in helping to balance the grid, potentially, in summers where we see increasing solar generation. Even just a few weeks ago, there were notices from the National Energy System Operator around schemes to help people use energy in those periods. It is relatively well correlated with when there is going to be a big solar load on the system. Increasingly, batteries are being rolled out in some homes, which will help store some of that very cheap electricity, using it in the evenings and nights when cooling. It is absolutely not one-size-fits-all; a mix of adaptations will be needed to solve it.

Dr Millar, in response to Sammy’s question, you mentioned how rapidly the planet had warmed—1.6° in a few decades. Is it fair to say that, historically, getting to that temperature would have taken a few thousand years?

Yes, I think the warming rates we are seeing are unprecedented. The current rate of warming globally is about 0.25° per decade or so, and we are about 1.4° above pre-industrial levels. If you take that forward just a couple of decades, that continues and puts us on track for a global warming level of 2° or so, with those heat extremes here in western Europe and the UK warming even faster across that period.

The speed is unprecedented. What should we be doing with buildings, whether public or private, to make them resilient for future increases in temperature, so that we do not have to keep coming back and retrofitting in future?

Good building design is key and is one of the things that appears across our report. When you think about flooding and some of the other hazards, building standards and what we are building today should be fit for purpose over the lifetime it is going to be there. We have something called part O in building regulations already, which requires thinking about overheating. That is good and we want that to be sufficiently forward-looking, so that you are thinking about resilience to future heatwaves and not just present ones today. Particularly for new buildings, there will be a set of low-cost effective passive measures that do not add much additional cost to a building when done at the start, as opposed to adding on later. That means you can push down the potential for cooling to be needed, and the scale of more active cooling from residents later on. You can save people money by designing things in the right way from the outset.

Barry mentioned schools and you mentioned care homes as places that will require active cooling. Will that be across the board, or are there certain areas we will need to focus on?

There will be certain areas. We were just speaking about new buildings. I think it is important always to put that in the context of probably about 80% of the buildings we will have in 2050 being around today already, so how do we deal with the buildings that exist right now? For those, there are some low-cost passive measures and some more expensive, more effective passive measures, but the package we have modelled we think is the most effective and cost-effective retrofit package for overheating, which involves some of the lower-cost passive measures, such as ventilation and internal blinds, combined with portable air conditioning units where needed, or reversible heat pumps. That package of actions has a set of benefits that come with it—in terms of avoided impacts from heat on productivity and health—which is about three times greater than the costs of putting it in place. That modelling gives us confidence that we could, with sufficient scale of action and adaptation in different settings, keep mortality to levels that are similar to today’s. Focusing on vulnerable areas is a key bit. Our analysis suggests that if we focus on about 30% of the highest-risk areas of the country, adaptations within this package could deal with about half of the mortalities from heat that we might expect to see in the middle of the century.

Bearing in mind what Sarah said about Spain, how can we roll out active cooling with a minimal impact on the grid?

I think it is about understanding how it fits into the future grid context. That grid is looking different. As was mentioned, there is increasing generation from solar on the system, and the ability for that to be correlated with times when we need to use the energy, and the ability to store energy, mean that when the grid actually needs a bit more demand to keep it stable, we can keep that cheap electricity and use it for cooling where needed. It fits in the package of measures that is needed. Again, coupling that with some of the low-cost but effective passive measures can push down the load in terms of people’s own need for energy, and therefore the costs for them. We think that the way to tackle this effectively in the cheapest way for the householder is some mixture of active and passive cooling in many settings.

I will just add that it also means to look at the community that surrounds the building. Up to a certain degree, nature-based solutions and green spaces can take down the heat quite significantly and create a lot of co-benefits. I think that that is an important thing to consider. Also, are there places to go to cool down, particularly for vulnerable people? Elsewhere in the world, there are innovative approaches, where they have dedicated cooling centres to go to in extreme situations. Therefore, having an emergency heat plan for particularly exposed areas is part of that package, as well.

Dr Millar, you referred to the 30% of areas that are most vulnerable. Is that simply geographical? Is that based on ones that are more southern, or cities, or were you talking about vulnerability of resources?

That is based on looking at where the hazard is high—where you get hot temperatures, which obviously is skewed to the south of the country and to urban areas, where you get that urban amplification—and, crucially, combining that with people who are a bit more sensitive to heat in their health, even in places that are less hot. For any degree of heat further north, you might get a proportionately larger effect, so it combines both where the hazard is high and where vulnerability is high. That is factoring in many factors around not only physical vulnerabilities, ill health and age, but ability to adapt. A mixture of metrics goes into that.

Importantly, it is not only an urban issue; we have not mentioned agriculture or the impact on the natural environment, where extreme heat is also detrimental. We had that in 2025, when UK yields were 10% lower across the board for crops like wheat and oats due to hot and dry weather. Again, we think immediately that heat is urban, but the picture is also quite challenging for some rural parts of the country.

What investment is needed, in monetary terms, to achieve effective heat adaptation?

Investment is needed in heat. As Professor Surminski stated, the total package across all the hazards that we looked at in the report was an annual investment ask of about £11 billion per year across public and private sectors. We think that roughly one third of that corresponds to dealing with heat, and that breaks down into investments in the health system—about £700 million in terms of cooling in hospitals and care homes and the implementation of some of the heat health action plans that we spoke about earlier—and other preventive measures. Most of that investment need—about £3 billion or so—sits in the private built environment: private buildings, homes and business buildings. We think most of that will need private investment to deal with that. Other public services such as schools, prisons and police correspond to about another £500 million of cooling investment that we identify in the report.

You mentioned private buildings and private contributions; what levers do the Government have to maximise the private contribution to heat adaptation?

There are several levers. As you rightly said, it is going to be a mixture of investment from public and private sources across the space. Taking those sources in combination, we think that for heat about three quarters of the investment will be private. Where levers exist to incentivise and support private investment, the things that we identify in the report include measures around regulation—we talked about building standards to ensure that those are built in from the outset—information so that businesses can manage their own risks, and working temperature regulations to provide an incentive so that businesses, which are already investing in cooling, do so in the right ways for their working practices and their workers.

What are the costs of doing nothing?

Across all the areas in our report, we think that the costs by the mid-century will rise significantly from what they are today. It could be of the order of 1% to 5% of 2050 GDP in terms of monetised damages that come from the climate impacts we are talking about. That comes from a range of sources, but the costs from those impacts corresponds to something like £60 billion to £260 billion per year. If we are talking about heat specifically, looking at the impacts around productivity, sleep and mortality, we think costs will probably reach about £3.3 billion in isolation in the next decade, but would rise significantly to maybe £7.6 billion by the middle of the century.

We were intrigued to see that you ran a citizens’ panel with 30 members of the public to inform your report. What are the key findings that came through from the citizens’ side?

I will start and then pass to Professor Surminski. We conducted an exercise that pulled together about 30 citizens, who were representative of different factors around age, urban and rural and so on, from all four nations of the UK. They were taken through a set of sessions that looked at the risks around climate change, what that means and some of the options and trade-offs involved in making the country well adapted. Some of the key things that came back were that people understood this when you took them through it: they understood that the weather is changing—they are experiencing that themselves in many cases, and they can see the impacts when you discuss 2022, flooding or other things with them. They understand that there are things that we can do, and that it requires investment to deal with it. They want to see adaptation that is effective and prioritises where you can get your biggest bang for your buck, and it really came through that a strong focus on vulnerability allows that to happen. People preferred nature-based solutions, where effective, because of the many co-benefits that they bring. A final point from me is that people also understood that there are elements of personal responsibility here. It is not entirely for the state to sort this. There are key bits around adapting their own homes and communities, and they wanted to understand their role and have the right information to enable them to do things that would be effective.

It is interesting that you say the participants came from all over the UK, because it looks as though the majority—22 out of 30—were recruited from Greater Manchester, where the workshops took place. You could argue that lots of national politicians are giving a lot of attention to Greater Manchester at the moment, and a better question is: “How do we make sure we have that broader perspective?” Is it not the case that many of them had not experienced overheating? How do you balance off different experiences with that geography?

It is a fair challenge, and one we have asked ourselves. In an ideal world, we would have liked to have done the workshops all over the country. I do not remember the reason why we selected Manchester to do it, but we then had eight representatives from across Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to at least bring that to the mix. It is also a significant time investment to ask of individuals, for them to spend time on a citizens’ panel. It was the first time we have done this with a specific adaptation focus; it is certainly an area where we should do more. It really shows the personal and lived experience of how these sometimes really abstract-sounding risks play out. I think that is an important insight. I should flag that the citizens’ panel was one way that we engaged, but we had various other initiatives and stakeholder engagement. The whole process ran for two years in terms of gathering information, and there were two big calls for evidence. It was a really big collective effort. I want to put on the record my thanks to all those academic, private and public sector individuals who contributed. It is an area in which the UK is looked up to—a lot of countries are looking for guidance—particularly because we have this process. This was the fourth risk assessment that we have done under the Climate Change Act, so that really gives us a strong baseline. We should not underestimate the number of requests that the committee gets internationally, where we provide advice and guidance on the back of our experience from what we are doing here. A growing number of private sector investors here in the UK are getting involved in adaptation elsewhere. I also work with the finance sector, where this is a topic that sits front and centre. There is a recognition that translating our knowledge elsewhere and helping other regions to become more resilient is something that we want the British economy to lead on.

It is also interesting that one of the recommendations was around nature-based solutions. There are lots of examples of joined-up working around flood mitigation and drainage projects through the Greater Manchester combined authority. It is interesting to run those sessions in areas with devolved powers, where they are doing joined-up work, and areas where they are not, so that you can start to show some pilot projects that are or are not working. It is absolutely about exploring the different options and making the case. That brings us back to the beginning again. What did the panel say about the heat risks? What sorts of specific concerns did they raise on that topic?

On the heat risk specifically, I think partly because of the location that was not something that people jumped to as their first climate impact—they thought of flooding first—but when we took them through how this worked and how it affects vulnerable people, they understood the risks. There were mixed views around the package of measures to deal with that—again, this preference for effective nature-based solutions came through. When we talked about active cooling, there was an acceptance of how effective that can be, and of the attraction of the ability to gain a sufficiently cool room in your house, but there were also appropriate concerns around doing that in the right way, so that it does not add to costs.

Something that is also observed—we have seen this recently—is the link between heat and droughts, and the interplay there. We have talked about cascading risks, and we have not mentioned wildfires. There is often an obvious link: an extreme heat period can easily lead to more wildfires. People are starting to experience these impacts in ways different from what we would have thought and are starting to get concerned. For example, on wildfires, the number of call-outs to the fire service during the heatwave was unprecedented. Examples like that also really bring it home that this is cross-cutting, and that these issues are affecting different parts of our systems.

We have four key recommendations for the next programme in the report: first, and most importantly, to establish some objectives and targets on adaptation, to set some yardsticks by which the Government can be judged, but also for whole-of-society resilience, and crucially for those to be allocated out to the right bits of Government and owned in the right bits of Government—so health targets in the Health Department, and so on and so forth, across Government. That is the key step to move us from where we are now, with a lack of clarity about what we are trying to achieve with “well adapted”, to something we can build a proper programme around. That leads on to the rest of it. Once you have those targets, we stand a much better chance of being able to back them with proper plans, like we are used to doing more on the net zero and reducing emissions side in terms of the scale of actions that are required and the right set of incentives from Government to get businesses and households to play their roles. The third bit is to monitor progress properly. We still do not do that well enough, and having targets is crucial to be able to start to say, “Well, what do we really want to measure to track progress towards that in different ways?” The final bit is around this still being an area that is too poorly understood in too many places across Government and at different government levels. There is a role for the centre—for DEFRA as the responsible Department that leads on the national adaptation programme—to help to raise the floor and skills across Government, so that they can properly own their targets, put in place the proper plans and see that delivered.

That is absolutely part of the part of the picture. One of our roles outside this role that we are speaking to you about now is to monitor progress, and those reports are for Parliament. They provide an independent evidence base from our committee and a judgment on where we are making progress, where progress is slower and where things could be speeded up, but it is then for Parliament to use them and to hold Government to account as you choose.

It is really important to reflect on how this plays out in our natural environment and for the food and agriculture sector. It is flagged in the report as a significant risk. The strategies there start with water capacity, obviously. There is a very strong point about building or reforming our water system—reservoirs are examples—and the approach to using water is really important. We are blessed with a lot of rainfall, and we need to take advantage of that and use that. I think there are significant advantages. At the same time, it is also about working with the farming community. We have started significant engagements there, and we actually have a new committee member who is a farmer. To build out, what does this mean? In terms of sharing information early, and having early warning systems to plan not just for shifting crop, potentially, but for livestock sheltering from heat, some interesting initiatives from abroad could be taken into account. I worked, for example, with some farmers in other countries on heat shelter systems that can be applied for livestock. Again, this is a broader approach, but the really key point to flag is that that is a new normal and not a freak event. We need to identify ways to prepare for it.

That is absolutely within the set of possibilities that the science explores. Rightly, it will explore the potential for some of the things that are called tipping-point effects, as you mentioned, which will have different effects on the UK. What our report actually does is foreground what we know, and we know a lot. Particularly when we think about the next decades through to 2050, we are confident that it is getting warmer, that the rainfall is getting heavier throughout the year, that summer drought risks are going up and that emerging risks like wildfire are coming. We think that that certainty and the economic case of acting now to prepare for what we know is coming through to the middle of the century is very strong. Of course, some of the deeper changes in the climate system are within the realm of possibility. In the report, we highlight the need to plan flexibly around how we can upgrade options or change them over time as we learn more about these things, but I think that it is fair to say that most of the effects of those will play out in the second half of the century. Again, that reinforces the need for this to be a process and to continue looking at what the science says, while at the same time not losing that clear message that we know a lot of what is happening right now. Things can be done that can save impacts and disruption to people’s lives today and in the years ahead.

That is why there is a strong message in the report on the need to marry what we are saying in the report about adaptations with continued focus on reductions of greenhouse gases domestically and helping the world to decarbonise, because it is really by reducing the future pathways of global emissions that we push down the potential for those kinds of tipping points as much as possible, particularly in the second half of the century. We are clear that we should absolutely be planning for plausible paths and looking at realistic worst cases out to the middle of the century and beyond—including, most critically, setting some targets against the 2° of warming by 2050—but at the same time, be keeping up all efforts to push the curve to lower levels. We are clear that it is still possible to keep to lower levels than 2° globally by the middle of the century with strengthened implementation of policies to meet targets in place globally.

That is absolutely critical, as you say. What the report does offer is—as it says in the title, what “A Well-Adapted UK” looks like—that more positive vision. When we say that it is a political choice, I think what that means is that climate change is complex—there are lots of factors, and we have talked about some of the cascading effects—but we sometimes lose the clarity that we know a lot, and enough, to get on with this in a few areas. What it is really saying is that we have sufficient evidence now to be able to put some yardsticks in the sand on some of those key areas and to set some meaningful adaptation targets. Of course, those need to be need kept up to date and revised over time as the evidence changes, as we do with decarbonisation targets, for instance. You are absolutely right that getting serious about preparing for the weather we are seeing today and in the future requires dealing with trade-offs, but it is only by articulating an ambition that we can have a proper conversation about what those trade-offs are. There are multiple ways to achieve these targets, and it is rightly the role of Government to think about how that is done, the distribution of who pays and the different aspects of it. We are really saying that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good here. Stepping forward and putting more concrete ambitions in the ground is not limited by the evidence.

To add to that, one challenge in resilience and adaptation is that they are always seen as something that can be pushed into the future, and as a cost today rather than an investment. Given what we know—a lot of the solutions exist and we have the levers; we can change building regulations and implement the plans we have—this country has really good adaptation plans, but we need to implement them, and we need to do it fast. If we do that, we can keep costs minimal, but we know from the evidence, and from what we are seeing elsewhere in the world, that if we do not, this will not get cheaper; it will get more costly. That is the challenge in all this. It is then really important to point out the co-benefits—to say that you are doing this to ensure that we have a country that is economically resilient. We have not talked about international risk, but that is a really important element. Our trading partners are dealing with similar challenges, so how do we deal with that? There is also geopolitical risk and our national security. We need to think this through as a fundamental element of how we plan for the future, rather than, “Well, should we build a resilient school—yes or no?” That is the mindset. I completely acknowledge that it might sound easy for our committee to say this, but we have been trying really hard to be as practical as possible here. There are good examples where we also see progress. I know that the underlying science does not look good, but we also have a really strong case for taking action. That is the balance that we are trying to find.

Professor Surminski, without putting words in your mouth, in response to Mr Hinchliff’s question about how we can afford this, you are really saying, “How can we afford not to?”, aren’t you?

Yes. I have worked in this space for a long, long time, and it has always been like a look into the future—“we will need to do this to avoid that.” Well, we have reached that point—climate change is with us—and we are trying to point out that we can do this without giving up on our other objectives and personal ambitions. We can do it in this country—it looks different in other countries, but here, we can.

A key recommendation of the report is that we set targets, which was a failure of the previous national adaptation programmes. Why are you confident that setting targets on climate adaptation will be any different from the way in which the Government set targets in every other sphere? They set targets, but departmental targets often clash with each other. “We want to build 1.5 million new homes, and we need to get rid of the bats and the newts.” “Oh, no, we in DEFRA have targets on land use and biodiversity, and we have to save the bats and the newts.” Surely, we need machinery-of-government change. We need generic teams working on these problems, not Departments working in siloes with targets that will often conflict with each other. Without that generic working—which the Cabinet Office is clearly not able to get by banging heads together—do we not actually need something like a department for sustainable development, to ensure that we look at the problems in the round and solve them rather than each of us, in our siloes, trying to pick off different parts? My challenge to you is that you have focused on the wrong thing in the report, because the Government have shown time and again that they cannot deliver on targets.

I think there are several bits to this. Proof of ambition is key when you do not have articulated ambitions. Our committee’s judgment is that targets will help to clarify what that means and allow more accountability than we have today. But, absolutely, targets by themselves will not do anything. The key thing is that they can then flow through to better plans, incentives and actions on the ground. That will require different things. Throughout the report, we try to provide suggestions based on the evidence around what that role can mean in those different areas, while also fully respecting our mandate to provide advice. Equally, the jump-out is accountability and ownership of the agenda. As you said, these things touch on each other, but there can be, I hope, a Goldilocks space between giving accountability to clear bits of Government, while accepting that these things will touch on each other, without it devolving into, “It’s all so complex, it’s all so inter-related, no one even owns it anymore.” Where the balance sits for that is for the Government; it is up to them to work out how to take what is ultimately advice from us on targets and turn it into things that will work.

Finally—because we are pressed for time—one thing that Baroness Brown brought out in the report was that many of these adaptation solutions are things that will make people’s lives better in a very tangible way, and we should therefore see them as politically popular. With spending on mitigation, it is very difficult to see a direct effect, but with adaptation, you can directly see the benefits, can’t you?

You can, and what the report shows, through the analysis that we have done to feed into this, is that there are impacts today, and if we were to put in place some of those adaptations, even over the next few years, we would see some of their benefits come back, both in terms of avoiding climate risk and of the co-benefits that come with those options. As you say, there is a clear case that that produces tangible near-term and long-term benefits for people.

Finally, we have been talking all about the impacts on us here in the UK. We know that the impacts of increasing temperature are far more drastic in many other countries, particularly India, which faces appalling droughts and extreme temperatures now. Does the work of the Adaptation Committee consider climate refugees and migration as a result of the impact of escalating temperatures on other countries’ ability to feed themselves and even survive, as well as other pressures on us? Is that considered part of your role or not so much?

We do have a chapter in the report covering national security and international assistance in which we summarise the evidence around climate as a risk amplifier and driver of other risks, including conflict and migration. The evidence generally suggests that migration is generally to adjacent countries and can often be temporary, but the key thing that we try to draw out of that is the complex way that that propagates through global, interconnected, geopolitical systems. Clearly, climate change, and how it affects threats that this country faces in the round, is an important part of national security planning. At the same time, we have international obligations, under the Paris agreement and other treaties, to contribute to development and improving the resilience of the world, which will have benefits in terms of helping to push down some of those systemic effects and risks to the UK.

Okay. Thank you very much indeed, Professor Surminksi and Dr Millar, for your evidence. Apologies to anyone following online for the temporary absence of the broadcast feed.