Billions in losses, 40°C heat and failing infrastructure: the climate warning rural Britain cannot ignore

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) could hardly have chosen a more auspicious week to land their latest report, with the heatwave shattering the UK’s previous May temperature record.

On Wednesday 20 May, the CCC – the government’s expert advisory board on climate change – published a landmark report on climate adaptation titled ‘A Well-Adapted UK’. The report lays out how underprepared the UK is for the near-certain, 2°C rise in mean temperatures by 2050, and provides a pragmatic, solutions-oriented framework for good adaptation. The government now has until 2028 to respond with a National Adaptation Plan.

For those who follow climate change closely, and for rural business on the frontlines of its impacts, the report should contains few surprises. Nonetheless, it is the starkest warning yet from the CCC. It marks a change in their approach to communicating on adaptation, designed to “kickstart the delivery of change”. It reflects a broader shift in the climate narrative to balance coverage of mitigation with more on adaptation.

But what do the report’s findings mean for the rural economy?

This blog analyses the report that is divided into 14 systems such as ‘health’, ‘waste’ and ‘land’, all of which affect the rural economy, meaning rural adaption extends far beyond land-use policies.

Expected global emissions point towards around 2°C of warming in the UK by 2050, rising to nearly 3°C by 2100. Higher increases or other unexpected temperature changes cannot be ruled out due to climate tipping points. The CCC recommends preparing for 2°C by 2050, and considering preparing for 4°C by 2100. At this point, summer heatwaves could regularly exceed 40°C.

We can expect wetter winters – a 7% increase in rainfall for each degree of local warming – and more intense downpours in all seasons. By 2050, peak river flows could increase by up to 45% and sea levels could rise by a further 20-45 cm by 2050 on present levels. There is likely to be 30% less water in rivers during dry periods than the end of the 20th century. The risk of extreme agricultural drought is expected to be threefold higher in 2050 than the late 20th century. The number of ‘high fire risk days’ is likely to double.

These could cause losses of £60-260bn annually in the UK by 2050, reducing GDP by 1-5%. Adapting to climate change will require a minimum investment of £11bn annually – around £5.5bn from the government, the rest from businesses and households – starting now.

A striking finding from the report is that two-thirds of this investment is concentrated in just three areas: cooling people, managing flood risk and storing water to deal with droughts. Heatwaves, floods, droughts and coastal sea-level rise are responsible for the bulk of impacts, with consequences that cascade through the economy.

The report contains many other sobering statistics:

• The area of the UK’s land surface classified as ‘high quality farmland’ is expected to reduce from an average of 38% (1961 to 1990) to 11% by 2050.
• The direct economic losses from water scarcity for non-public water supply abstractors like agriculture and power generation could increase by 50% to £5.7bn annually by 2050 (2025 prices).
• Economic losses due to climate change in wheat, barley, oats, dairy cattle, free range hens and lambs could increase by 34% annually on present levels by 2050. In the worst-case scenarios, we could see £1.9bn annual losses in agricultural output by the 2050s (2025 prices).
• Heatwaves could increase excess heat-related deaths in the UK to 3,000-10,000 per year by 2050, assuming neither population increase nor adaptation. Heat-related hospital admissions could triple by 2050.
• The percentage of the rail network at risk of flooding in England could rise from 37% today to 54% by 2050, and from 38% today to 46% for the road network.
• By 2060, annual food price inflation is likely to be sustained at 1.1–1.8% above the underlying long-term rate due to extreme heat impacts alone.

The CCC’s language throughout is stark – as seen in the following paragraph from the Executive Summary:

“The Committee agrees that adaptation cannot wait. Keeping people secure is a fundamental duty of the State. This is already being compromised by climate change. Adapting to climate change needs the same level of focus and commitment as geopolitical and other security threats. Damage is already happening which can be avoided. Taking action today is cheaper than taking action tomorrow. The main challenge is leadership, getting adaptation underway at sufficient scale and speed.”

The report’s findings emphasise how important it is for CLA members and other rural businesses to invest now in adaptation. However, the report is not a how-to guide on adapting individual businesses or households. Its purpose is to guide public policy on adaptation, leaving individual businesses “to choose their desired level of adaptation and the appropriate adaptation actions.” For example, it recommends how government should allocate public spend on adaptation; resilient soil and water management and strong flood defences are two key areas requiring public funding. The report recommends increasing the annual UK flood protection budget to £1.6-2.1bn; it is currently £1.4bn in England. Many areas of policy hold back adaptation, and the report makes welcome recommendations on some of these, like change to protected site regulations so the land managers are not required to conserve non-existent habitats.

The report highlights the varied, interconnected risks across the rural economy from changes to extreme weather. For example, extreme weather may cause an electricity failure that means a business cannot take card payments. The same storm might cause coastal erosion to a historic landfill site that releases hazardous material. It might prevent fresh produce from leaving a farm as roads are flooded. The message here is to take a holistic view of climate risks in your own business, extending beyond its gate.

That’s not to say that accounting for climate risks is easy. Only 29% of UK businesses currently assess climate risk due to lack of information, the CCC finds. It has recommended that the government swiftly funds this information and skills deficit, which could be transformative at a cost of only £7.5m.

Rural businesses and households will need to take measures to tackle heatwaves, which are the deadliest component of climate change. The UK Government will need to set clear resilience standards in planning and building regulations, and provide public support to vulnerable places and households to retrofit existing stock. This will involve active cooling (air conditioning and air-to-air heat pumps) and passive shading. The government is recommended to set new regulations on maximum heat that workers can be exposed to. Similar investments and retrofitting opportunities are needed on flooding with Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) and Property Flood Resilience (e.g., flood doors). More frequent collaboration with infrastructure providers to prune vegetation is a little-discussed aspect of adaptation in the energy and transport sectors that rural businesses will need to negotiate.

There should be a trickle-down effect to members from the CCC’s recommendations for banks, insurers and large food companies to integrate high-quality adaption plans into their core business plans. Climate resilience is a strong driver for supply-chain investment in soil health, so bolstered reporting duties could drive considerable adaptation support for farms. Conversely, the CCC predicts that losses on bank lending could be 50% higher compared to a future with no further climate change. Rural businesses may need to prepare for more difficult negotiations with banks unless they can prove the ongoing climate resilience of the asset they are investing in.

Several themes emerge across sectors. One is the importance of diversity and redundancy to reduce the impacts from extreme weather. This applies in farming and forestry to avoid monocultures susceptible to disease and spread losses, but also to supermarkets to source food from many locations internationally to avoid climate-related supply disruptions, to the public water supply in having different source options and to electricity transmission operators to build in redundant capacity to cope with heatwaves. Resilience standards are another cross-cutting theme: the CCC views these as a crucial, proven way to embed adaptation into infrastructure.

This report is particularly notable because the CCC did not have to write it. The CCC’s statutory duty under the Climate Change Act 2008 is to provide a risk assessment to the government every five years, which it satisfied by publishing a technical report in partnership with the Met Office (the ‘Fourth Climate Change Risk Assessment – Independent Assessment’, or CCRA4-IA). The ‘Well-Adapted UK’ report translates the technical material of the CCRA4-IA into a call to action to decisionmakers across the economy, which perhaps reflects an evolution in how the CCC sees its role.

The CCC criticises previous governments for having failed to produce National Adaptation Plans that deliver adaptation on the ground. These are the government’s statutory obligation under the 2008 Act, and the report is explicit that previous versions were “not fit for purpose”. Therefore, perhaps the most important aspect of the ‘Well-Adapted UK’ report are the frameworks it provides which emphasise measurable objectives, creating delivery plans backed by the necessary resources and monitoring on progress. The expectation is that the government should use these when drafting its Fourth National Adaptation Plan, due in 2028, although there is no statutory obligation for the government to listen.

None of the frameworks are groundbreaking, but they shift adaptation from something optional into something engrained in performance management. Ideally, they could be a template for senior project managers and a mechanism of government accountability. For example, there is a target that “from now through to 2050, domestic food production as a share of food consumed should be sustainably maintained at 60% at least”, which could benefit rural areas in ways beyond adaptation.

The report skates over some of the more contested areas of land-based adaptation. For example, research published last year suggests that sphagnum mosses will no longer be able to grow in much of the UK’s peatlands by 2050 due to climate change. If the modelling is correct, the CCC’s recommendation to adapt peatlands to wildfire only by rewetting them is very dangerous. Rewetting is one component of wildfire resilience, but a more important component is fuel load management via prescribed burning – something the Well-Adapted UK report ignores.

Overall, much of the ‘land’ chapter is quite surface level, referencing general categories of action. It is not the CCC’s role to provide detailed policy delivery recommendations – such as the changes to abstraction licencing and planning to deliver farm reservoirs. However, these form the main barriers to adaptation, and need to be resolved before businesses can adapt themselves.

The CLA welcomes the ‘Well-Adapted UK’ report. It is a stark reminder of how serious and urgent climate change is for rural businesses, and how unprepared the country and government policy are. The report is pitched at the government, and arguably its most far-reaching contribution is also the least glamorous: a framework for how to embed and monitor action on adaptation.

We will continue our complementary work influencing to overcome regulatory blockers to essential adaptation actions like farm reservoirs.