Climate Adaptation UK: Autumn 2025

Welcome to AdaptationUK News, August/September/October edition! Edited, this quarter, by Edward Robinson.

🌡️ THE HIGH LINE: Ratings & Warnings

Autumn this year seems to have brought a strange combination of news: scientific reports on the multiple challenges we are facing across all planetary boundaries on the one hand, and a daily flurry of stories about corporates, political parties and institutions U-turning on ESG and climate commitments (or having their budgets cut) on the other. The outlook is, therefore, decidedly ‘mixed’ ahead of COP30, which kicks off in three weeks. But there is some good news behind the gloom, namely that there does appear, in some circles, to be much greater recognition a) that more needs to be done; b) that solutions that involve a mixture of mitigation and adaptation measures exist; and c) that the rate of change is almost as important as the magnitude of change when it comes to effective adaptation. Strong message here: acting faster pays off!

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Key Reading:

(click on the headlines to read the full stories)

CCC to ministers: “4 degrees cannot be ruled out”. An official letter to DEFRA last week, from Baroness Brown, chair of the Climate Change Committee’s adaptation committee, dished out some hard truths: we should be planning to adapt for 4°C of warming. “It is clear we are not yet adapted for the changes in weather and climate that we are living with today…Planning for global warming levels reaching 2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2050 should be a minimum level”; and “reaching 4°C above pre-industrial levels by the end-of-century cannot yet be ruled out and should be considered as part of effective adaptation planning”. The CCC is also calling for a set of long term objectives and (importantly) interim five-year targets to be included in the next National Adaptation Plan.

Official: English Harvest was the Second-Worst On Record. Provisional Defra numbers released last week show estimated cereal yields being hit hard by the summer weather. The wheat harvest is down 17% on the ten-year average, while barley is down 14% year-on-year. You can read an AHDB analyst blog on the stats here and some news coverage here. The worst harvest of recent years remains 2020, according to the ECIU. Both the NFU and Greenpeace called for more investment in resilient crops off the back of the news. Full stats here. But you can also read a Substack post from Hannah Richie (of the World in Numbers) showing that global harvests of corn, wheat, soybeans and rice are on track for record-breaking harvests, again. ‘This is one reason why a global interconnected food system can be much more resilient than local ones’ says Richie. Free Trade rides again!

The UK may have just suffered its first ‘Mega-fire’. Adam Vaughan at the Times reports on the possibility that last June’s Carrbridge and Dava Moor wildfire in the Scottish Highlands was the UK’s first “mega fire”. It burned more than 10,000 hectares of peatland and forest (a new record for a British wildfire), and is likely to have killed thousands of animals, including curlew chicks and hartoes.

Ratings Agencies: “Prepare for 2.3 degrees!”: S&P Global has told Mr Market that they think that a global average surface temperature rise of 2.3 degrees over the pre-industrial average is about evens by 2040. As their analysts point out: ‘this suggests that as a baseline - all sectors, including households, may want to prepare for the impacts of physical climate risks associated with a 2.3 C world.’ They also provide some commentary on why their probabilistic approach could narrow the climate finance gap by making adaptation investment more tangible.

Private-sector adaptation spending is slowly rising in Europe. Better news here from a June paper in Nature we missed in the last newsletter. It presents businesses’ adaptation investments across 28 European countries between 2018 and 2022. According to the data set, annual investment in climate change adaptation rose from €15 billion in 2018 to nearly €60 billion in 2022, a 243% increase. The Netherlands tops the charts of ‘big’ spenders, followed by Greece, Croatia and Italy, with Ireland and Luxembourg bringing up the rear. Importantly, the report touts adaptation spending as good value for money.

“Our econometric analysis shows that public adaptation spending does not deter private investments in climate change adaptation. On the contrary, we find that public adaptation spending mimics the trend of other public investments, especially those on infrastructure, and generally crowds in private investment across a variety of economic sectors and countries”

On the micro-scale, AdaptationUK News was delighted with the response to our Spring & Summer newsletters, which attracted nearly a hundred new readers. Please keep sharing us if you like us. We’re also on the hunt for some funding to allow us to do some more in-depth reporting, including a series with British adaptation and resilience heroes, disruptors and truth-tellers of all kinds. If you’re interested in supporting us with this, and having more frequent newsletters (which more funding would help for!), do drop us a line, send us tips or remonstrate with us here: tom@adaptationuk.com

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🏣 UK ADAPTATION: POLICY UPDATES AUTUMN 2025

The big ones:

It’s all just a bit too negative (for No.10)! Government sources told the Times’s Adam Vaughan that the findings of the “Global Ecosystem Assessment” report (which deals with the risk to the UK of forests, coral reefs and mangroves being degraded) were too negative for No.10 to permit publication, especially with the Brazilian government touting for funds ahead of COP30. Both WWF and the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative criticised the decision to block the report.

The Conservatives are U-turning on climate. HM Opposition is dropping its own 2050 Net Zero commitment and pledging to repeal the Climate Change Act. While the Conservative Environment Network barely flinched, former Chair of the CCC, John Gummer/Lord Deben, took to the FT to reproach the Tory leader for potentially ‘throwing away 17 years of achievement’. In her conference speech, Shadow Energy and Net Zero Secretary, Claire Coutinho, did pledge to protect nature, on principle, with the caveat that ‘nature is not Net Zero, in fact some of the time it pulls in the opposite direction.’ You can read her full speech here.

The small ones:

New UK Environment Secretary. Former New Labour special adviser turned MP, turned lobbyist, turned MP again, Emma Reynolds, is the new Environment Secretary (the tenth in ten years) after the reshuffle triggered by Angela Rayner’s resignation from the Government, in September. Reynolds was formally a junior Treasury minister. Emma Hardy remains in post as flooding minister.

UK government’s Darwin Project supports 80 new projects in developing countries. 80 new local projects, spread across 36 developing countries and 12 UK Overseas Territories, will be funded by UK government with the aim of ‘restoring ecosystems, safeguarding nature, securing food and water supplies and improving lives.’

ISO faces calls for adaptation standard. This is wonky but potentially significant. The International Standards Organisation is facing calls to integrate adaptation guidance into its new finance transition standard, as some stakeholders feel the draft focuses too heavily on decarbonisation. While the ISO has published standards like ISO 14090 for adaptation, recent revisions (e.g., ISO 9001, ISO 14001) require organisations only to consider climate change, rather than providing specific adaptation strategies. Does this need to change?

European Investment Bank doubles adaptation finance to €30 billion between 2026 and 2030. The EIB has released details of phase two of its Climate Bank Roadmap. ‘The enhanced support will focus on agriculture, water cycle management, companies, cities, regions and vulnerable communities, in close collaboration with the European Commission and national, regional and private sector partners.’ So it’s pretty broad brush. The new EIB Group Green Checker can help you see if your project can qualify for funding. UK projects are eligible.

The Lib Dems have an updated adaptation policy. The Liberal Democrats unveiled a new policy paper at their conference which commits the party to ‘prioritise protecting communities by implementing a comprehensive UK adaptation strategy, embedding climate resilience into decision-making across all government departments.’

The Green Party has a new leader and 100k members. Zack Polanski, former Lib Dem and current member of the London Assembly, won the Green Party leadership election in September and has been making waves with a new brand of ‘eco-populism’. He has previously written a piece called ‘A gender and intersectionality responsive climate adaptation plan for London’, which you can read here.

🎓 From the MACC Hub

• On 25th September, The Maximising Adaptation to Climate Change Hub hosted its first ever MACC Hub Conference, in Edinburgh, with Scottish NGO Verture. You can read summaries of the sessions and the many research projects involved in the Hub on this blog from MACC’s Jennifer Pavel.

• You can also find MACC’s monthly webinar series here and explore their evolving Knowledge Hub here. “A key focus for the year ahead is learning by doing through our Flexible Fund projects, which will pilot place-based adaptation solutions and test bold ideas in real-world settings” MACC will also shortly launch its OpenClim workshops, with the aim of supporting local and regional actors with climate risk tools to inform place-based adaptation planning.

• Finally, do you want to know how to talk climate change adaptation with “sceptical scrollers”? Check out this toolkit from Climate Outreach.

📚 WHAT WE’RE READING

Must read of the month: Tory grandee, Lord Deben, (former Conservative environment minister and former chair of the CCC), who lays into Kemi Badenoch and Claire Coutinho for their pledges to abandon the 2050 Net Zero target and repeal the Climate Change Act.

Other top stories of the season include the following (in no particular order, so do scroll to your favourite section!):

💰 FINANCE & INSURANCE

Are Pension Funds defying the great Green retreat? The FT’s Moral Money man, Simon Mundy, has spotted that the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance (NZAOA), founded by 86 pension funds, is one of the few large Net Zero alliances of its kind left standing. This is after the closing of the Insurers Net Zero alliance, the halting of activities at the Asset Managers Net Zero initiative and, in early October, the official disbanding of the Net Zero Bankers Alliance. At a recent AGM, the NZAOA pledged to do more on climate adaptation. Mundy thinks that specific (long term) fiduciary rules and less obviously misaligned incentives makes this the Net Zero financial sector alliance to watch.

Aviva’s not for turning. The mega insurer’s CEO, Amanda Blanc, told journalists that the company was ‘not wavering on climate transition plans, which she said were an important step in responding to a further rise in extreme weather events affecting its insurance business’. Aviva reported a 22% jump in operating profit to £1bn for the six months to June.

“The State of Responsible Investment is not fit for purpose”. An updated paper by Ellen Quigley, of Cambridge University, makes an argument that ‘universal owners’ of assets like pension funds and sovereign wealth funds ‘have an interest in the long-term health of the financial system as a whole’ and ‘cannot diversify away from systemic risks such as climate change, inequality, and pandemics, and can only mitigate whole-system threats by effecting change in the real economy’. The remainder of the nearly 100-page paper explains why. You can watch Professor Quigley interviewed here.

The Auditors are alright. This year’s Risk in Focus (2026) report published in September by the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors showed them to be less worried about climate and nature risks than a year before. ‘Climate change, biodiversity and environmental sustainability dropped from 6th to 10th place, making it the biggest mover in the survey. In addition, while 16% of respondents said it was a top 5 area of internal audit effort (down from 20% in 2025), only 24% predicted that it would be a top 5 area of effort in 3 years’ time..’ As the authors themselves note in the report, the fall is ‘illogical’.

McKinsey Big Number Alert. Demand for technologies that support climate resilience and adaptation could create a $1 trillion opportunity for private capital by 2030, according to a report by five McKinsey partners published in September. The authors say they are spotting shifts in market behaviour that suggest an increased focus by corporate customers and consumers on building resilience. An example they give is the increased adoption of the FORTIFIED standard, a voluntary set of construction and reproofing specifications in the US. ‘The number of buildings adopting this standard doubled between 2019 and 2024, with a 30 percent increase between 2023 and 2024 alone’. However, the report also profiles Climate Policy Initiative data showing that the private sector contributed only 11% of investments in climate resilience in 2024. There is work to do!

🚜 FOOD, FARMING AND INVASIVE SPECIES

Climate-related shocks could increase UK food prices by more than a third in the run-up to 2050. A new report by the Autonomy Institute highlights the increasing vulnerability of the UK’s food supply chain and its socioeconomic impacts. Households could face an additional bill of £1,247 by 2050 in a worse case scenario modelled in the report. Public diners, buffer stocks, price controls and support for sustainable agriculture are all recommendations for the government .

Last summer’s drought was a ‘nationally significant incident’ in England. The National Drought Group, meeting at the end of August after the driest six months running up to July since 1976, escalated the drought to a nationally significant in England, with six regions affected..

£3 billion of UK food imports exposed to climate impacts. An August report from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found that around £3 billion of the UK’s food imports come from ‘the top 20 counties for internally displaced people due to extreme weather’. Pakistan, for example, is the UK’s second largest supplier of rice, but is far from recovered from the devastating floods of 2022, which displaced millions. And rice prices in the UK rose by 33% in that year, for example. The report comes on top of an anonymous letter in April signed by senior figures in the UK food supply chain to investors, warning that companies were not taking the risks to their supply chains seriously.

What food and drink will the UK grow as temperatures rise? The Grocer’s David Nott takes a jog round the possibilities. (Subscribers only.)

“Worst year for pea growers in memory”. UK farmers are gearing up for a difficult and costly winter as the lack of straw (owing to a summer of drought) makes covering certain crops (like carrots) as much as 40% pricier, according to the British Carrot Growers Association. Straw shortages will also impact on the price of feed, leading some farmers to predict shortages of British food on shelves this winter.

Stressing out plants on purpose (in Essex). The Sunday Times’s Science Editor, Ben Spencer, gets to see onions growing in aeroponics towers (with no soil) at Essex University’s multi-million pound Smart Technology Experimental Plant Suite (which tests plant varieties for drought resistance). He also meets a Northamptonshire farmer who tells him about the benefits of green manure: “A 1% increase in organic matter in your soil holds 330,000 litres per hectare of water.”

More coffee growers turn to drip irrigation as ‘insurance’ against increasing climate challenges. In a recent conversation with AgFunderNews, Ram Lisaey, head of global agronomy at Netafim, outlined how drip irrigation technologies might be able to help mitigate some of the risks coffee farmers are up against.

Australia battles ‘superweed’ threat to wheat exports. The FT reports on the scourge of Wimmera Ryegrass, which apparently costs farmers over US$60 million in lost wheat exports. It’s resistant to most pesticides, so the race is on to find a solution, as more dangerous herbicides (like paraquat) are set to be banned. The article features an Oxford University spin-off, Moa, that ‘tests pesticides against prehistoric plant species’.

🔥 FIRE RISKS

UK wildfires have burned an area twice the size of Glasgow in 2025: August analysis from Carbon Brief finds that wildfires have scorched more than 40,000 hectares in the UK to date this year. This is the largest area of land since records began in 2012.

Landscapes exposed to £12 million of losses from wildfires. Specialist carbon credits insurer Artio produced a report in September modelling the potential downside exposure of landscapes in England and Wales to wildfires. The potential carbon losses are large, at around 200,000 tonnes of CO₂ storage. The Brecon Beacons faced the largest threat. While the research was obviously commissioned with a commercial angle in mind, it does raise important questions for carbon offsets, nature restoration and storage projects in the UK and beyond. How much is on the line if they go up in smoke?

Global wildfires ‘burned an area of land larger than India in 2024’. In further wildfire news, Carbon Brief reports on a new “state of wildfires” report, finding that global wildfires burned at least 3.7 million square kilometres of land – an area larger than India – between March 2024 and February 202’. While this is actually lower than the twenty-year average, the carbon emissions associated with the fires (8 billion tonnes of CO₂) are actually 10% higher than the equivalent average since 2002. This is due to more carbon-rich forests being subjected to fire (as opposed to less carbon-rich grasslands) according to the authors.

Scottish farmers offered grant funding after helping combat ‘unprecedented’ wildfires. BusinessGreen reports on a new grant available to farmers in Scotland who helped firefighters tackle blazes this summer, but sustained damage in doing so.

🌱 NATURE

West of England councils deliver flood protection through wildlife restoration. A £120 million investment in Avonmouth and Severnside is a great example of an adaptation, resilience and climate-positive project. It offers 17km of new flood defences for local communities. In addition, habitats have been created across two hectares of native trees and shrubs, offering a home for barn owls, bats, otters, and re-introduced water voles, one of Britain’s most endangered species.

Marine heatwaves to become more frequent off UK and Irish coasts, experts say. The unprecedented marine heatwave of 2023 was in line with climate modelling, research shows, as scientists warn such events will become more frequent. During the heatwave, temperatures in the shallow seas around the UK reached 2.9C above the June average for 16 days, seriously threatening sea life.

Is climate change making UK droughts worse? This guest post from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology gives the Carbon Brief treatment to questions of drought and climate change. Expect graphs! (Spoiler: yes it is)

🏡 BUILDINGS & INFRASTRUCTURE

Aviva: “Towns may have to be abandoned to Flooding.” The Guardian splashes on Aviva analysis showing “the extent of concern in the sector”. The insurer thinks that 8 million properties will be at risk of flooding by mid-century (up 27% from today), with those at risk of unpredictable flash flooding rising by 66%. The paper also reports on the plight of Tenbury Wells, in Worcestershire, which has become the first town in the UK not to be able to insure its public buildings after four floods in the last six years. “We are the blueprint for what could happen in the future” the deputy mayor says.

World’s major cities hit by 25% leap in extremely hot days since the 1990s. The world’s major cities now experience a quarter more very hot days per year on average than they did three decades ago, according to new analysis by IIED. “This isn’t a problem we can simply air-condition our way out of. Fixing it requires comprehensive changes to how neighbourhoods and individual buildings are designed, as well as bringing nature back into our cities in the form of trees and other plants”, the IIED’s lead principal researcher, Anna Walnycki, highlighted.

English Heritage publishes its Climate Resilient Home Model. The 3D model uses Gainsborough Old Hall, in Lincolnshire, as an example of a heritage building, but the risks highlighted can be applied to all heritage buildings. Take a digital stroll round this historic hall and consider yourself blessed that you don’t have to find the budget for it.

🏥 HEALTH

Human-made global warming ‘caused two in three heat deaths in Europe this summer’. Epidemiologists and climate scientists have attributed 16,500 out of 24,400 heat deaths from June to August this year to the extra hot weather brought on by climate change. The Guardian carries a story on a new report authored by Imperial’s Friederike Otto. ‘The vast majority of heat deaths happen in homes and hospitals, where people with existing health conditions are pushed to their limits,’ said Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and co-author of the study.

Climate-driven health risks could cost the global economy $1.5 trillion in lost productivity by 2050. This is another “big number story”, brought to you, this time, by the World Economic Forum and the Boston Consulting Group. The report focuses on four highly-exposed sectors: agriculture, built environment, healthcare and insurance.

🔺 TIPPING POINTS

Polar ice sheet collapse: It’ll be too late before we know for sure, but 1.5 degrees is probably too high. A synthesis paper in Nature looks at the best modelling on the classic tipping point of ‘self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms that lead to rapid ice-sheet retreat’. As the authors point out, ‘rapid rates of sea level rise…may be triggered by only a small increase in temperature but which propel the system into a new and contrasting state which requires a much larger decrease in temperature to return to the original state’. Basically, it takes much longer for ice sheets to regrow (tens of thousands of years) than to retreat (centuries to millennia). While the East Antarctic Ice Sheet could possibly still hold out even at 3 degrees above pre-industrial tempratures, rather worryingly, this synthesis of recent work suggests a best estimate of 1.5 degrees of surface temperature change as the threshold above which the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Sheet could be triggered. Gulp!

‘Unprecedented’ Marine heatwaves are posing a threat to ecosystems. The world’s oceans experienced a staggering amount of warming in 2023, with vast marine heat waves affecting 96% of their surface, according to a new study whose authors say this could mark a turning point in the way the oceans behave, potentially signalling a tipping point from which some ecosystems may not recover. In October, a group of 160 scientists released a report arguing that the world’s coral reefs are being pushed into (metaphorical) uncharted waters, with around 80 per cent of them being subjected to a major bleaching event, driven by warmer ocean temperatures. The Global Tipping Points report was led by Professor Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter.

“The world is getting hotter, and fast.” Bloomberg picked up on a graph published on climate scientist Zeke Hausfather’s Substack in October, showing the percentage of the world’s land that has experienced its hottest month on record in each decade since the 1870s. Shockingly, ‘roughly 78% of it set temperature records in the 21st century. And 38% set records in the 2020s — despite the fact that the decade is only halfway done’. Zeke’s Substack post is here.

Retailers could lose £146m per year without net zero adaptation. In what reads like a hark-back to a saner era, this article profiles a report by Mitsubishi Electric, which includes responses from 500 facilities managers across the UK retail sector, finding that 80 per cent believe becoming more sustainable practices will improve profits, but (as so often) ‘a lack of investment planning threatens implementation’. They also admit to fears that their shops could become uneconomic due to poor environmental performance - and this is the source of the headline finding. This may not be the most robust piece of economic modelling around, but it is useful reminder that the ‘people on the shop floor’ often seem to worry more about real world risks than the ‘c-suite’. Possibly as they know they’ll be the ones dealing with them.

🌊 COMMUNITIES & RESILIENCE

It’s not all bad news! You can read a bunch of case studies about successful climate resilience action at local level at Ashden’s new climate change adaptation network, which ‘supports councils across the UK to take action, whatever their size or resources’. Read about roadside rain gardens in Enfield, Hampshire’s Year of Climate Resilience and much more besides, here. You can find out more about the network and join it here.

Have Brits stopped caring about climate change? A September story in the Times claimed to reveal swing voters are now starting to doubt the seriousness of climate change, based on a focus group in Watford that’s been running since 2021. You can also listen to a podcast on the story here.

Climate Majority Project NGO publishes SAFER: Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience. Rupert Read’s Climate Majority Project has launched a new toolkit for communities to help them become more resilient to climate change. They are calling for the British government to develop a National Adaptation Plan, which would “adequately protect all essential programmes of government” from ever-worsening climate damage, along with a public information campaign. Download the full report here.

🌎 INTERNATIONAL

Former US EPA Adaptation Director speaks. We try to focus on UK news here at AdaptationUK, but this New York Climate Week interview with Ben De Angelo, from the excellent (and British) editor of Climate Proof, Louie Woodall, is worth it.

Japanese insurance company buys engineering company to help clients reduce climate risk. In a sign of things to come, the FT reports on Tokio Marine - Japan’s largest non-life insurer - acquiring engineering firm ID&E, with a plan to offer ID&E’s services to 100 Japanese companies at risk of landslides, flooding and other disasters. A Nomura insurance analyst is quoted as saying that this is a first of its kind.

India is undercounting deaths from Extreme Heat. According to data obtained under the Indian Right to Information Act by the India-based NGO Heat Watch, India reported 7,192 suspected heatstroke cases but only 14 confirmed deaths due to extreme heat between March and July 2025. The heatstroke stats are much higher than previously thought. The researchers call for more transparent data and warn of flawed heat alerts . For example, ‘the India Meteorological Department heatwave alerts are based almost exclusively on temperature thresholds and exclude Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT), which measures the combined danger of heat and humidity. This leaves millions at risk in coastal and high-humidity regions, where health stress rises well before official alerts are triggered.’ Textile and garment factories on the coats are particularly affected.

📆 EVENTS

● The EU’s Pathways to Resilience Conference is live now! (20-24 October), with all sessions available to watch online.

● The Shift Conference will take place on 30th-31st October in Dusseldorf, Germany); a corporate Climate Adaptation conference run by Handelsblatt.

💭 FINAL THOUGHT

This quarter, we leave it to Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters to outline the strategy behind an interview series we’re hoping to launch in 2026.

If you’ve got this far, you deserve a bit of YouTube! 😉