If you think the temperature uncomfortable today, let me take you to the last day of July 2052, the rays of the climbing sun reveal a city still sweltering in the residual heat of the day before. From the air, London resembles a colossal refugee camp. Streets, gardens and parks are teeming with tents and cobbled-together shelters, within which the city's residents have spent another uncomfortable night away from the heat traps that their houses and flats have become. After six days when the temperature peaked at about 40C, another scorcher is on the way.
Half-hearted attempts to upgrade insulation across the country's housing stock ran out of steam and cash decades earlier, and most homes still have few barriers to the infiltrating heat. Almost all the country's electricity is now from renewables, which has brought the cost down, but the relentless onslaught of extreme weather has driven an ever-deepening economic depression across the world. Many now have air conditioning, but can't afford to run it.
Early risers yawn and stretch as they queue at standpipes for water. A succession of dry winters and a spring drought have brought water rationing across the south-east of England, adding to the woes of those waking from another sticky, broken sleep. Ironically, there is plenty of rain now, and every day ends with an electric storm and torrential rain. Most of this, however, cascades directly into storm drains that can no longer cope, bringing surface flooding to lower-lying parts of the capital, but no end to the dearth of potable water.
Growing crowds cluster around state-run grocery stores that provide the basics at affordable prices. Failed harvests at home in the previous two years, and massively reduced food imports, as other nations stricken by extreme weather hold on to what they have, has meant the rationing of bread and other staples. Supermarkets still exist, but they are struggling to keep prices down, and so cater almost entirely to the wealthy.
The power is out again, as it has been intermittently since the start of the heatwave. The problem isn't generation but transmission; the extreme temperatures making cables sag and break and causing transformers to overheat. The doors of houses are open to let in the relatively cool air of the night, although the temperature hasn't fallen below 29C. Trailing cables lead to televisions that some have shifted outside to watch, when the power is on, and to laptops over which crouch office workers marooned at home by widespread transport problems. A combination of the heat and extended power outages has brought chaos to rail and tube networks, while damage to road surfaces and malfunctioning traffic lights means that getting to work by car is a lottery.
Every hospital is overwhelmed as the incessant heat and humidity take their toll on vulnerable people, the old and the very young, and the final death toll across the country once the heat has abated is likely to be in the tens of thousands.
The picture I paint here is one that few today would entertain as a future reality, but it has every chance of coming to life if we continue to blunder unprepared into a climatically challenging future. We have just experienced the hottest May day on record, setting the scene for even greater summer heat that would not be possible without global heating. The temperature exceeded 40C for the first time in the UK during the baking summer of 2022, which resulted in the early deaths of more than 3,000 people. Network Rail issued a “do not travel†warning at the peak of the heat, while thousands of homes in the north of the country lost power. Parts of London only avoided blackouts because the National Grid paid record amounts for electricity imported from Belgium.
Now imagine this level of heat lasting for a week or more. Having accelerated in the past 10 years or so, the global average temperature is currently climbing at a rate that will see a 1C rise every 28 years, meaning that the planet will be more than 2C hotter than preindustrial times by mid-century. Given this level of heating, temperatures of close to 43C will be possible by 2050, so the playing out of my scenario is perfectly feasible. In fact, even under the current climate conditions, three or four consecutive days above 40C can happen.
As the UK Climate Change Committee flagged last week in its latest report to the government, our country is not built to handle such heat and its all-pervasive ramifications. More than nine in 10 homes are not well insulated enough to keep out the heat, while by 2050 there is forecast to be a daily shortfall in water supply of 5bn litres. The three worst UK harvests all occurred in the period from 2020 to 2025, contributing to the loss of grain equivalent to a year's worth of bread supply. We currently import 40% of our food, but as the harvests of other countries are also increasingly affected by extreme weather, we will no longer be able to rely on this continuing. The world's second-biggest producer, India, recently banned all exports of sugar for four months. Such a policy of “we hold what we have†will only become more prevalent as climate breakdown takes an ever greater toll on global agriculture.
But this isn't all a done deal. We can't stop what's coming, but we can do plenty to help us cope better. At the top of any to-do list is the critical importance of properly insulating our entire housing stock, so that homes can become refuges from the heat rather than potential death traps. At the same time, the large-scale roll out of generously subsidised rooftop solar power, combined with battery storage, will do much to make homes at least partly independent of the grid, and able to run air conditioning during peak heat, even when the power is out. Personal rainfall harvesting, which is already big in Germany and other countries, will also help to address the predicted water deficit. While we need to seriously rethink the country's food strategy as a whole, encouragement and incentives for as many people as possible to grow at home their own fruit and vegetables can also help to ease the burden of inevitable shortages.
While such measures will help to mitigate the worst, casting a shadow over our efforts will be the impact of a failing climate on the global economy, and the consequences for the UK – with a number of analyses forecasting significant reductions in global GDP by mid-century. Inevitably, this will translate into increased hardship for many UK citizens, compromising their ability to cope with the new conditions. At the same time, a seriously weakened national economy will leave government with less money to build the resilience the country needs to successfully prevail in a hotter world.
Bearing in mind that we continue to pump out CO2 equivalent to the weight of 800,000 Titanics every year, and fossil fuel corporations are actively planning to expand operations, it is practically impossible for emissions reductions to happen fast enough to reduce the rate at which our world is heating. Consequently, 40C-plus mid-century heat in the UK is now baked in. We need, then, to face the fact that life in the 2050s is going to be very different from today, and act now. The sooner we recognise this and begin – as a nation – to prepare and adapt accordingly, the better we will be able to meet these enormous challenges to our everyday lives.
