The UK “is very much not adapted to climate change and not prepared”, according to a lead author of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The study, published this week and approved by 195 countries, says the worldwide impacts of the climate crisis are more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance of securing “a liveable future for all”.
In the UK, more flooding from rivers, at the coasts, and from intense downpours in urban areas is one of the biggest impacts, the report says. Sewage works, airports and seaports are among the key infrastructure at risk, along with the impacts of storms on the electricity and communication networks.
While winters are getting wetter, summers are becoming drier, and water shortages are on track to increase in England and Wales, the report says, doubling in frequency within decades.
Heatwaves are also a rising and deadly threat, with many homes and hospitals unprepared. One in three heat-related deaths in the UK between 1991 and 2018 were caused by global heating, according to a study cited in the report.
Global climate impacts will also cause shortages of imported goods and increase their price in the UK, the report says, as well as damaging markets for British exports. The report even warns of financial instability due to economic shocks caused by climate change.
“The IPCC report backs up the conclusions of the UK climate change risk assessment (CCRA) published in 2021,” said Prof Richard Betts, at the UK Met Office and a lead author of both the IPCC report and the CCRA. “The key point is that the UK is very much not adapted to climate change and not prepared.”
Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser to the UK government, responded to the IPCC report by warning of increasing extreme weather in the UK. He said: “This will strain housing, agriculture, transport and supply chains – little of which was built with such pressure in mind.”
He also warned of more wildfires endangering cities near moorland, such as in Manchester and Sheffield. “The challenge is enormous but it can be met,” Vallance said.
The IPCC report, which is based on 34,000 scientific studies,says that over the past three decades the UK and Europe have experienced the highest number of river floods in the past 500 years.
It says some coastal communities in the UK may have to move inland and that the number of people at risk of annual coastal flooding in the UK would rise from 3.2 million to more than 5 million in a worst-case scenario.
“As an island nation, what happens on the coast is a particular issue,” said Mike Morecroft, at Natural England and one of the 234 lead authors of the IPCC report.
But he said restoring nature on the coasts, such as the example of the Steart salt marshes in Somerset, could provide better protection than hard defences.
Peter Alexander, at the University of Edinburgh and another IPCC author, said climate impacts on farming in the UK and around the world affected people.
“We are part of a global food system. We import close to half the food that we consume and, if the rest of the world’s agriculture is being impacted by climate change, then we’re going to effectively import those impacts to the UK, largely through potentially higher food prices,” he said.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC), the UK government’s official advisers, said in June 2021 the government was failing to protect people from the fast-rising risks of the climate crisis, with action to improve resilience not keeping pace with the impacts of global heating.
The CCC’s experts said they were frustrated by the “absolutely illogical” lack of sufficient action on adaptation, given that taking action is up to 10 times more cost-effective than not doing so.
“We must go much further and faster to truly prepare for the impacts of a warmer world,” the government acknowledged in its legally required assessment of climate risks, published in January. “In the majority of risk areas we need to take more action.”
The IPCC report was “stark”, a UK government spokesperson said: “We are working at pace on our national adaptation programme [due in 2023], with robust measures, including £5.2bn to tackle flooding and coastal erosion in the UK.”
The IPCC report strongly emphasises that the climate crisis hits the poor, vulnerable and excluded in society the most, and that addressing inequality is an essential part of tackling global heating.
“Different segments of the population can be more or less vulnerable, and that applies not just in developing countries but within the UK as well,” said Prof Lindsay Stringer, at the University of York and an IPCC author.
The chair of the CCC’s adaptation committee, Julia King, writing with the former chair, John Krebs, said: “Adaptation should be integral to ‘levelling up’ [in the UK]. Poorer households are more severely affected by the health and financial consequences of flooding and other extremes.”
“The UK has the capacity and the resources to adapt but the government is simply not doing enough,” they said. “Lack of action now is storing up problems and costs for future generations: they will have to pay for our negligence.”
