National Heat Risk Commission - about us
The National Heat Risk Commission was established in March 2026 to provide independent expertise and strategic advice on how the UK can improve its resilience to the growing risks posed by high temperatures. It is based at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Commission is independent of government and LSE.
The Commission is chaired by Emma Howard Boyd CBE, Professor in Practice at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and former Chair of the London Climate Resilience Review.
The Commission will publish an interim report in late summer 2026, outlining key issues, immediate risks and the landscape of UK heat vulnerability. It will publish its final landmark report in June 2027, followed by an outreach programme in the second half of 2027 to support the integration of its findings into policy and private sector planning.
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.
