Why are our homes and cities all so hot?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, why can't the UK cope when it gets hot, hot, hot?

0:24If you're listening outside the UK, you might be forgiven the eye roll. The Brits, obsessing over the weather, tell us something new. But this week's heatwave across Britain and much of Europe doesn't feel like an ordinary event. Take it from Fiona Harvey, The Guardian's environment editor.

0:44Fiona Harvey:You know, we get heatwaves in this country, but they're usually in July or August. We're still only in May. And just a few weeks ago, people had their heating on. People were running around in jumpers and long trousers and so on, you know. At its hottest, the country saw a record-breaking 35 degrees. Sweaty, maybe feeling unwell, unable to sleep. We've been talking about these tropical nights, which is astonishing for the UK. In short, I am allowed to be cranky because it's very, very hot. Absolutely. I'm not getting enough sleep. We should all be cranky. We've become a nation of toddlers. And this isn't just about the fact that we're not acclimatised to tropical nights.

1:30It's our entire infrastructure, homes, schools, hospitals, office blocks, most of which weren't built for the climate we now have.

1:45Fiona Harvey:We've seen the heat records for May not just surpassed, but really shattered. You know, normally heat records are surpassed by, you know, a fraction of a degree, something like that. But this time we're talking about more like two degrees nearly. And that's a lot. From The Guardian, I'm Noshie Nikbal. Today in Focus, if this is the new normal, how do we adapt?

2:17Fiona, it is hot. It was much hotter earlier this week, but it is still very warm today. You are The Guardian's environment editor, our cool, calm voice. Now, before I get to the big questions of climate change, how do you deal with a heatwave?

2:35Fiona Harvey:Well, I think it's important to try to take the basic measures first. If you're out, obviously wear sunscreen, wear loose clothes, you know, light clothes can help. I'm not doing that today, but, you know. The cottons. Do as I say, not as I do. But take those kind of obvious precautions, wear a hat, you know, something to shade you. Are you a baseball hat, a bucket hat? What kind of hat do you wear? Bucket hats, you know. Let's come over like it's mid-90s again, you know. Why not? Yeah, but whatever it is, just do whatever suits yourself. People talk about wetting a tea tile and putting it over their fan, keeping some ice on hand.

3:17Fiona Harvey:Really important to stay hydrated, obviously. And if it gets really hot, there's no shame in having a nap at the hottest time. I'm glad you've said it. That's what people do in hot countries. They have a siesta and a nap at the hot time and then they come out at night when it's cooler. The core thing here is that we in this country are not used to thinking of ourselves as living in a hot country. It always comes as a massive surprise to us. We need to get used to it and to say, OK, we need to adopt these habits, these traditions that people have evolved over millennia in other countries. and that can help us.

4:03Well, according to a new report from the Climate Change Committee, the CCC, as you say, we can expect this in the UK and in Europe to become our new normal. Fiona, can you tell me about the report's other key findings?

4:18Fiona Harvey:Well, this was a massive report and it's been several years in the making. And it's a warning shot to the government, really. it's to say, look, none of the plans that have been brought forward for adapting the UK to the impacts of the climate crisis are adequate. They said very clearly none of the plans are fit for purpose. What are those plans at the moment? It's been more about telling people to expect higher temperatures than it's been about telling them what to do. And a lot of it has been about flooding because, you know, you forget about this in a heat wave, But one of the big impacts of the climate crisis is that we get wetter weather in shorter bursts.

5:00Fiona Harvey:So a lot of what the UK has done to date has been about flood prevention, flood risk, building seawalls, concrete barriers around rivers. Also trying to do some natural flood prevention, like trying to re-wet some peatlands, some wetlands. Some of them have been very effective, but they require a huge amount of investment and not all of that investment has been made. But there are other areas where we are really behind. Drought planning, for instance, the opposite side of the coin, has been neglected. We need places to store water. We haven't built a new reservoir in this country for 30 years.

5:36Fiona Harvey:And yet the population has increased in that time and the demands for water and our rainfall patterns have changed. So we need these new reservoirs and we need ways of moving water to where people need it. And this is what the report's recommending? The report is very clear about that. The report is also saying a lot about farming because obviously farmers are extremely affected by all of this, by both drought and flood, and by higher temperatures, which affect the yields of many plants. And they need to start adapting. It's hard for them to do that because a lot of farmers are very stretched.

6:14And it's so unpredictable, right?

6:15Fiona Harvey:Yeah, it's making the farming year completely different to today's farmers than it would have been for their grandfathers or even for their parents, you know, farming. So we need to look at our food production and how we maintain that. At the moment, you know, we get about 60 % of our food from the UK. And the Committee on Climate Change is very clear that we need to maintain that. Because, of course, we don't exist in a vacuum. You know, there's heat weaves all over Europe. There have been heat weaves in the US. We're seeing massive heat weaves in India and various other countries. And what we're seeing this year could get a lot worse.

6:53Fiona Harvey:This issue used to be just regarded as weather. You know, it's of interest to, you know, do I need my brolly today or, you know. It's a national obsession. Exactly. But it's much more than that. It goes much deeper. And now what we're seeing is the climate being seen as a national security issue. Because if you're in a country that you turn on the taps one day and nothing comes out, then that's a really serious issue for everyone. It's a business, an economic, a health issue. It's a political issue, national security issue. It encompasses everything.

7:34Fiona, can we focus on the heat aspect for a moment? Because your write-up of this report was so stark. I was actually reading it out loud to my partner, in which you wrote, you know, nine out of 10 homes in the UK will overheat. We need to be installing aircon basically everywhere now. It's quite a lot to process for a country that's always had a pretty mild climate. Now, according to that CCC report, it sounds like the UK, as you say, is way behind in terms of adapting to a hotter world. Why is that?

8:07Fiona Harvey:We haven't taken it seriously enough in the past. We still have this mindset that we are a cold country. And for a lot of the year, we are. There's also a danger in this report. We could actually become a colder country as well as a hotter country. The system of currents and winds in the Atlantic, usually people call it the Gulf Stream, which isn't quite accurate, but that's how people know it. And it brings warm weather to Europe generally in the winter and makes our climate milder than it would otherwise be. That could be faltering and it could stop or reverse. And that would bring much, much colder winters to the UK.

8:50Fiona Harvey:We would be seeing a lot of the country ice-bound for huge swathes of time every winter. temperatures could drop to, you know, sort of minus 10 and minus 20 across a lot of the country in those kind of winters. And yet we could still get hot summers like this one. That's really, really hard to get your head around. If we look at the impact of heatwaves, it seems like other countries did take lessons from earlier examples. We're thinking of the 2003 heatwave in Europe that killed 70 ,000 people. Other countries in Europe took action, but the UK didn't really. Can you give me other examples of adaptation that could be made or examples where this work is being done and being done well?

9:33Trees can make five degrees of difference, which is huge, really.

9:37Fiona Harvey:We need to be planting them all over the place, providing fountains and public access to water. You walk around a European city in Southern Europe and Italy or whatever, and you will see fountains all over the place. You might have seen in some European cities, you get these kind of misting machines. They kind of spray out water in a fine mist, which is very, very cooling. You can have green roofs where you kind of grow plants on your roofs and that can be cooling, that can cool a city. Or you can paint roofs white to reflect more of the sunlight back into space. So we have technology to do this and we have natural methods as well.

10:15Fiona Harvey:We just need people to use them. They seem like quite simple, easier fixes. Why is a take-up not really there? People haven't really needed them. There have been efforts to do it. I think, you know, there are tree planting schemes and so on, but you need to follow through. It's not enough to just dump these trees off the back of a lorry. They need to be nurtured and looked after, and that's expensive. Green areas are really important. There's a frightening number of people in this country who don't have access to any green areas. We saw that during the lockdowns, you know, where people were cooped up all day, every day and couldn't get access.

10:58Fiona Harvey:We need to, when we are building new homes, new housing, build in green areas. You know, don't pave over every single surface. You know, when you pave over surfaces, it creates problems with flooding, you know, with the runoff. but it also creates more heat. Fiona, let's talk about buildings in the UK because they do play a big part in why it feels like we're melting. What's wrong with the way they've been built and why are they coping so badly in the heat? Well, a lot of them were built a long time ago. We had a different climate than. So a lot of our housing stock is just not built for this.

11:43Fiona Harvey:But you can adapt it. But it's not just those older houses. A lot of the modern houses we've built have not been built very well. A lot of the flats that we allow builders to build are tiny. You know, and if you're in a very small flat, it can feel like a rabbit hutch. Have building regulations adapted to climate change so that, you know, anything that's built now has to be fit really for hot temperatures? We have this new future home standard, which is coming in. A lot of that has focused on insulation for keeping homes warm so that you use less energy to heat homes. But you've got to provide means of cooling homes as well.

12:26Fiona Harvey:And actually, that has been a bit of a blind spot in those regulations. There's one solution which is probably going to become more popular is heat pumps. Now we're used to thinking of them as a replacement for gas boilers, but they can also be used the opposite way around. They can be used to cool rooms during hot weather. Insulating houses as well can help to keep heat out, but people have got to use it right. People have got to be taught, in a sense, how to use their own homes. It's not just homes, is it, that potentially need this retrofitting with heat pumps and better insulation. It's also the places we work, shop and what have you.

13:07Fiona Harvey:Well, if the government were to say that, you know, people can't be expected to work in temperatures above a certain level, then that would mean that employers would have to ensure that all of their buildings were capable of being cooled to that kind of level. Workplaces have not taken this seriously because they haven't been regulated to do so. For instance, in Spain, you know, the recommendation is that workers shouldn't work above 27 degrees. Here in the UK, where's the pressure for government to impose those new rules for working? I think the pressure is coming from unions at the moment and from workers themselves.

13:47Fiona Harvey:And I think we will see that pressure increasing because more and more this will impact on productivity. Workplace efficiency. Yeah, when it starts affecting the bottom line, companies will pay attention.

14:08Fiona, what were the short-term fixes recommended in the report and how easy are they to implement?

14:15Fiona Harvey:The report notes that there are a lot of people in vulnerable situations who are particularly at risk and are not being looked after. And so the report demands that within 10 years, we should have air conditioning in all hospitals and care homes because old people are really very much at risk here. And what about children and young people? They were also mentioned, right? Children and young people, we will need to have air conditioning in schools as well. The committee has given the government a bit longer to do that. We will need to have air conditioning in schools by 2050. But that's quite a big thing to do.

14:54Fiona Harvey:I mean, refurbishing the UK schools is going to be a big operation, really. But the school year as it's currently constituted is based on farming from centuries ago. That's where our school year came from. There's no reason why you couldn't change that. Why do we have people taking exams in June? From what you're saying, air conditioning is really at the moment at the heart of what could make things cooler and easier for us living here. But isn't there an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of that? Because everything we've learned about living sustainably says that air con is bad. It requires huge amounts of energy and contributes to climate change.

15:30How does one square that?

15:32Fiona Harvey:Yeah, it is. And global cooling, air conditioning around the world produces more greenhouse gas emissions than many countries. It's a conundrum. It's clear that we will need air conditioning in a lot of homes. But you can mitigate the impacts of that by not having it at too low temperatures, by only using it when it's necessary. In this country, we're not likely to need air conditioning all the time. If we're telling people get air conditioning, we need to also be saying, well, you know, don't turn it up too much. You don't need your home to be icy. Give them kind of operating temperatures within that.

16:15Fiona Harvey:They've done that in France where they've said, actually, you know, don't have air con if it's below 26 degrees. And, you know, that seems to work. We need to prepare for the fact that we will need a lot more electricity. Once you've accepted that all of our electricity needs to be low carbon and we need a lot more of it, then it becomes a bit easier, really. But isn't there still a fundamental question of inequality here? In the same way that some people can't afford to heat their homes, some people won't be able to afford to cool them. There's a real danger here that the UK will become a much more unequal society as we become a hotter society.

16:57Fiona Harvey:And that's for a lot of reasons. One is, you know, just affording air conditioning, affording to adapt your house. Another is food. Food prices are going to go up as a result of this, you know, because farmers are facing more insecurity. So we will be paying more for our food. Schools as well. The government wants all schools to have air conditioning, but not until 2050. If you're a private school, you're probably going to have air conditioning a lot sooner. So your pupils are probably going to be better looked after. There's lots of ways in which our unequal society today will become more unequal in future if we're not very careful.

17:34But given our struggling economy, you know, the current housing stock, the state of the schools, a government that is trying to scrimp and save, how could this practically be done even if there was political will for it?

17:46Fiona Harvey:Making electricity cheaper. Renewable energy is the way to do that. We've seen the consequences of fossil fuel wars. Twice now in the last five years, we've had fuel crises and inflationary crises, economic crises coming from fossil fuels. How many more of these crises do we need to see before we learn? You can't took off the supply of wind or sun. And the UK is generating an awful lot more of its electricity from renewable sources now than it was. going for green electricity has already brought down electricity prices. You haven't noticed that because the electricity prices are still hitched to the price of gas, which is a really silly way to operate now and which the government should be changing and can change.

18:35Fiona Harvey:But that's why people are seeing increases in electricity prices, even though they should be seeing falls from the amount of renewable energy we've got. When we sort that out, we will have cheaper electricity and we should have more abundant electricity as we build out more wind farms and more solar panels.

18:59Coming up, in the hottest week in May we've ever seen, enter Tony Blair and his call to abandon net zero.

19:22This week, Tony Blair, who entered the public imagination, made headlines with his grandstanding essay on what the country needs. And one of the things he argues for is an end to aiming for net zero. What do you make of that and the current conversation around it?

19:37Fiona Harvey:Well, Tony Blair obviously has his views. And he was prime minister a long time ago now. He never really grasped the climate crisis when he was prime minister. and he doesn't appear to be grasping it now. Net zero is not some arbitrary target that a politician dreamt up. It comes from science. It comes from the world's leading climate scientists telling us what we need to do to avoid the worst ravages of climate breakdown. Now, if we have a breakdown in the climate, then our economy will be destroyed. You won't be talking about GDP. You won't be talking about inflation. You'll be talking about rat barbecues.