National Heat Risk Commission - Grantham Research Institute on climate change and the environment

Planning for a hotter climate

The National Heat Risk Commission is an independent commission established to help the UK prepare for the growing risks of extreme heat.

These risks are already manifesting and were brought to the fore in July 2022 when the temperature in the UK passed 40⁰C for the first time in recorded history. Runways softened; rails buckled; hospitals filled up. Wildfires took hold in London suburbs. Nearly 3,000 people died from heat-related causes that summer, most of whom did not need to.

The Commission’s work is intended to support the broader national effort on resilience. Our case is not that heat matters more than other hazards: but rather that the gap between the scale of the risk and the scale of the current response is wider for heat than for almost any other climate hazard the UK faces.

Further details about the Commission

National Heat Risk Commission – About and contact details

National Heat Risk Commission – publications

National Heat Risk Commission – commentaries

National Heat Risk Commission – In the news

Why a focus on heat is necessary

Heat is a systemic hazard demanding a systemic response.

Heat is not like the hazards the UK’s resilience systems were built to handle. While a flood has a perimeter and a storm has a track, heat has neither. It is an invisible transfer of energy that moves through bodies, buildings, materials, networks and ecosystems all at once, and it does so silently.

The consequences ripple across every sector. Heat strains hospitals and care homes. It buckles railways and softens roads. It causes surges in electricity demand at the moment generation efficiency falls. It dries up reservoirs, stresses crops, slows down construction, empties classrooms and damages habitats. And it compounds with other hazards: air pollution, drought and wildfire.

Heat within a wider test of national resilience

The UK is being tested by pressures that arrive together: geopolitical instability, rapidly changing information environments, technological change, strain on public trust, and mounting pressure on the natural systems that underpin human life. National resilience is the capacity to absorb shocks, adapt to changing conditions, and continue functioning under pressures that arrive from many directions at once.

Within that wider picture, heat is one strand and one for which the institutional architecture is conspicuously thin. Flooding has a national strategy, a lead agency and dedicated capital programmes. Heat does not. France, Spain, Germany and others have moved further than the UK on heat governance, and there is much to learn from their experience.

Heat falls unevenly

Heat does not affect everyone equally and the pattern is not random. Exposure hits unevenly: people in poorly insulated homes, top-floor flats, dense urban areas with little green space and workplaces without cooling. Those who are most sensitive to hot conditions are older people, infants, pregnant women, and people with cardiovascular, respiratory and mental health conditions. Meanwhile, those best placed to adapt are those with the resources, security and agency to change their homes, work or travel habits.

In each dimension, the burden tracks existing patterns of disadvantage. Heat risk is not only a public health question: it bears on the country’s social and economic trajectory, and on the resilience of the institutions that underpin both.

A decade of analysis; a decade of waiting

The case for action on heat has been made in the UK for more than a decade. Parliamentary committees have examined it. The Climate Change Committee has reported on it. The UK Health Security Agency has documented the deaths, the admissions, the patterns. Universities, research institutes, civil society organisations and frontline practitioners have contributed a substantial and coherent body of evidence.

The country does not lack analysis. It lacks delivery. Recommendations made in the early 2010s are being repeated, almost word for word, in the mid 2020s. Every year of further delay is paid for in lives, in pounds, in productivity and in trust.

What the Commission is examining

Alignment across sectors: what would help align effort across sectors and jurisdictions, including with European and international partners.

Work already underway: surfacing the activity on heat resilience that national reporting tends to miss.

Gaps: where the evidence base is weak or contested, and where particular populations, sectors or locations have been underserved.

Implementation: the policy, regulatory, financial and institutional levers that would turn long-standing recommendations into action.

How we will work

The Commission will publish an interim report in summer 2026 and a final report in summer 2027. The final report is not an endpoint. It is intended as a reference point for sustained action far beyond the life of the Commission itself.

We are an independent body. We do not deliver programmes, set regulations or operate services. What we can do is provide an authoritative evidence base, identify where action is most needed, and offer a shared reference point that others can use with confidence.

Three audiences matter most:

Government, at every tier, holds the levers of regulation, public spending, statutory duty and convening power. Where government chooses to move, our work should help it move further and faster.
Business has the capacity to invest, innovate and build resilience into operations and workforces. Where businesses choose to lead, our work should help them lead with confidence.
Local authorities and communities are where the impacts of heat are felt most directly and where many of the most effective responses are designed. Our work is intended to recognise that experience and support those closest to the impacts.

The case is wider than avoided harm

Countries that build resilience to heat are countries with healthier citizens and fewer preventable deaths. They have cooler homes, cooler schools, cooler workplaces and more reliable public services. They are countries where the industries of adaptation, including cooling technologies, retrofit, resilient design and climate data and modelling, are growing rather than imported. They protect the natural systems on which resilience ultimately depends, from urban trees and green space to rivers, wetlands and soils.

Action on heat is not in tension with the UK’s wider ambitions on health, growth, infrastructure and the transition to a low-carbon economy: it is part of the same project.

The summer of 2022 showed us the country we have. The work ahead is to build the country we need. We invite contributions from every part of it.