We’ve failed to stop climate change — this is what we need to do next

There are only so many times, however, that the same stories can be told.

Laurie Laybourn, director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, said: “It’s only really now that the penny is dropping that we didn’t prevent a global-scale climate crisis. We’re now in a global-scale climate crisis.”

The wildfires in Los Angeles, flooding in Valencia, and the storms that have battered the British Isles this winter — Bert, Darragh and Éowyn — have confirmed what the scientists have long forecast. Climate change is no longer something that can be averted: it has arrived.

In January the Met Office announced that global average temperatures for 2024 had risen 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. One year’s weather records do not in themselves mean the 2015 Paris Agreement, which set out to limit global warming long-term, has failed. But the Met Office also warned that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is still rising, and is now “incompatible” with the modelled pathways that would keep warming below the totemic 1.5C.

“There is an adjustment that’s needed now to understand that that preventative project has not worked,” Laybourn said. “Emissions reductions were not tried at the scale that were needed — being confronted with that failure is actually quite difficult for people.”

After years of focusing on averting climate change, what climate scientists refer to as “mitigation”, experts are warning that we now need far greater focus on adaptation to cope with the new weather that comes with a warming world.

There is no doubt that in the UK we are not ready for climate change. Chris Stark, former chief executive of the climate change committee (CCC) and now a senior energy official, in 2022 described the government’s planning for global warming as “genuinely poor”, blaming a “wilful reluctance” to factor adaptation into policy.

This reluctance goes back years. In a speech at Chatham House in September, the former Labour politician David Miliband admitted that preparing for global warming had been something of a taboo. “When I was environment secretary in 2006-7, it felt as though talking about adapting to climate change meant admitting defeat on mitigating climate change.”

Climate change for the UK means hotter, drier summers and wetter winters with more frequent, more severe storms.

The new Labour government has pledged to get to grips with the problem, promising in its manifesto last year that it would “improve resilience and preparation across central government, local authorities, local communities, and emergency services”. It added: “Without action, flooding and coastal erosion will pose greater risks to lives, livelihoods and people’s wellbeing.”

But Baroness Brown of Cambridge, who chairs the CCC’s adaptation committee, said ministers have not yet followed through. “We’ve had some positive conversations, but it hasn’t got to anything beyond that yet,” she said. “Ministers and civil servants nod and say ‘yes, I understand the problem’. But we’ve got to see some action.”

Last spring, while the Conservatives were still in power, the CCC published an assessment of the UK national adaptation programme. It made for grim reading. Adaptation “falls far short of what is needed” and “lacks the pace and ambition to address growing climate risks, which we are already experiencing in the UK”, the report said. It added that the government’s plan “fails to set out a compelling vision for what the government’s ‘well-adapted UK’ entails”.

In April the CCC will publish its next adaptation report. Brown said: “I fear we will be saying a lot of things we’ve said before.”

Labour has made decarbonisation a key part of its programme for government, with achieving a clean electricity system by 2030 one of its five core “missions”. But there is growing unease among experts that such a laser focus on a single aspect of tackling climate change means others are neglected. “The missions programme is great,” one senior official said. “Stuff is getting done. But there is a risk that anything that is not part of the ‘mission’ falls through the cracks.”

The consequences of failing to adapt are already becoming clear.

According to a new report by the Association of British Insurers (ABI), last year insurance companies paid out a record £585 million for weather-related damage to homes and possessions.

Mark Shepherd, head of general insurance policy at the ABI, said: “Our latest data serves as a blunt reminder of the devastating damage that adverse weather can cause to people’s homes and businesses. Prevention is always better than cure. That’s why we continue to advocate for climate resilience measures to be carefully considered in all planning decisions and building standards, to ensure properties are fit for the future and that they are not built in areas prone to climate risk.”

Yet the risk is growing. According to an Environment Agency report published in December, 6.3 million homes and businesses in England are now in areas at risk of flooding, up from 5.5 million in 2018. By the middle of the century, the number of properties at risk is expected to rise to eight million — one in every four homes in the country.

Summer heat is also a problem. Our entire infrastructure, our homes, offices and schools, is designed for the cold, rather than heat.

In the blistering heatwave of 2022, when Britain’s first 40C day was recorded and wildfires raged across the country, there were 3,469 “excess” deaths linked to high temperatures. The train network also ground to a halt. Our tracks are designed to cope up to 27C — above that and trains must run slower to avoid buckling the metal.

But it is not as simple as redesigning our entire infrastructure for a Mediterranean climate, because then it wouldn’t be able to cope with the cold. Train tracks, for example, need to be able to withstand low temperatures — and designing tracks that can cope with both extremes is an engineering headache.

“It’s not just storms and heatwaves that we need to worry about,” Laybourn said. “It’s that those storms and heatwaves smash up the food supply and lowered harvests increase food prices. They also increase the cost of fertiliser, which further increases prices. That then cascades into higher overall inflation, which itself then influences politics.”

He added: “Over the last six months in 2024, the big year of elections, that inflation played a major role in toppling some governments. So it’s those ripple effects that are increasingly emerging as some of the most concerning threats coming from climate change.”

It is not just the UK failing to prepare. The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) in November published its “adaptation gap” report, setting out how far the issue has been neglected. It found that annual global spending on climate adaptation is between $187 billion and $359 billion short of what it should be, “with adaptation planning slowing and implementation falling behind”.

Inger Andersen, Unep executive director, said in the foreword: “People and the natural systems upon which our livelihoods depend are increasingly in danger from the hell and high water that climate change is bringing. The world must get serious about adaptation, now.”

Laybourn stressed that while much more must be done to adapt to climate change, it does not mean that politicians should abandon decarbonisation. “You have to do both,” he said. “If you’re busy mopping the floor you mustn’t forget to turn off the tap.”

Part of the reluctance to push forwards with climate adaptation is finding ways to pay for it. Decarbonisation is a relatively easy sell: it is not difficult to persuade a developer to build a wind farm or install solar panels if they can then profit from the cheap power they generate.

Flood defences, on the other hand, do not generate a return, so central investment is needed.

But experts say a long view is required. Existing flood defences in Britain prevent £1.15 billion in damage each year. Laybourn thinks this approach is required for other sectors. “If the UK had a more nature-abundant, more balanced, sustainable farming system, for example, it would mean that the farming system was better able to handle shocks.”

A UK government spokesman insisted adaptation was being taken seriously: “Alongside transitioning to become a clean energy superpower and accelerating towards net zero, the government is taking robust action to prepare for the impacts of a warming climate.” He pointed to “record investment of £2.65 billion to repair and build new flood and coastal defences, protecting tens of thousands of homes and businesses across the country”.