In its landmark 2019 report on the future of UK housing, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) pulled no punches on its assessment of the climate resilience of our homes.
“UK homes are not fit for the future”, the statutory advisory body stated bluntly, observing that the UK’s 29 million existing homes needed to be made low-carbon, low-energy, and resilient to a changing climate.
In the half decade or so that has followed, we have made some progress towards the ‘low-carbon’ and ‘low-energy’ spokes of this wheel. However, our existing homes are little more resilient to a changing climate now than they were in 2019.
Meanwhile, our planet continues to warm unceasingly. While climate projections carry an inherent degree of uncertainty, the target of limiting warming to 1.5°C, as per the Paris Agreement, is slipping from reach. According to the UN Environment Programme, there remains a large possibility that eventual global warming will exceed 2°C or even 3°C, a possibility that some scientists now believe to be inevitable.
The implications of these scenarios for UK homes are simultaneously urgent and underappreciated. Already, up to four fifths of UK households report their homes overheating in hot weather, an increase from just one fifth in 2011. Around 6.3 million UK homes are at risk of flooding, a number that will rise to eight million in 2050 on current climate trajectories.
Wind and driven rain will also increasingly affect homes across the western and southern coastlines of the UK, making them more vulnerable to rapid heat loss and serious fabric problems. At the sharp end of the different warming scenarios, the extreme climate events we currently think of as rare will gradually, yet inexorably, become the norm.
Although the impact of these events on the structure of our homes, buildings and wider infrastructure is great, the economic and health reverberations are also worth considering. Around one third of people who experience a flood event develop depression, anxiety, and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The evidence is also conclusive that overheating exacerbates risks to health and wellbeing, especially when indoor temperatures exceed 25°C. If temperatures continue to rise, overheating in buildings could, according to the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, cause 4,500 premature deaths per year by 2050.
The economic cost of climate events is larger still. Just two months ago, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries – not famed for their alarmism, being risk specialists – estimated that more than ten per cent of global GDP could be lost if 1.5°C of warming is exceeded.
To an extent, we are seeing these impacts already; observe for example the groundbreaking London Climate Resilience Review, which documented how the 2022 heatwave melted roads and caused hospital IT infrastructures to fail in the capital, delaying operations and bringing the city to a partial standstill.
In this future world, a world that is increasingly intruding into the present, our homes have a central role to play. As the Labour MP Torsten Bell writes, there is hardly any corner of our lives not profoundly shaped by our homes, not least our physical, mental, and financial health.
Our collective ability to make our homes more resilient to a changing climate – to install shutters to block out extreme heat, or reinforced doors to prevent the entry of swollen floodwaters – will at least partly determine the extent to which a warming world impacts our health, the economy, and our prosperity.
In other words, it is time to take the CCC’s 2019 assessment of the future of UK housing seriously, all of it, and get on with the urgent task of climate proofing our homes.
Given the level of warming we are likely headed for, we must place this task on an even footing with the installation of low-carbon heating and energy efficiency measures. Retrofit programmes that do not include provision for climate adaptation and resilience measures are essentially flawed, missing an opportunity to climate proof our homes – and the people who live in them – in one fell swoop.
How might we do this? In a chapter published in the forthcoming UK Housing Review and an accompanying paper released with the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, we have sketched out a way forward.
Our proposal is to incorporate climate resilience into an updated Decent Homes Standard (DHS), potentially via the creation of a ‘Criterion E’. This new criterion would stipulate that a home cannot be defined as decent unless a) it has a ‘climate resilience audit’ carried out, and b) it has been subsequently upgraded with all recommended measures to meet a reasonable definition of being climate resilient.
Linking this new DHS to a suitable funding stream – perhaps provided through a new Decent Homes Programme that consolidates and simplifies existing funding streams for retrofit, building safety, and housing quality – would enable us to the rise to the challenge of climate proofing our homes. Of course, the cost of this programme would be large, but the cost of doing nothing to our health, the economy, and the planet potentially far greater.