Heat-related deaths will triple over coming decades without government action on overheating in our residences, caution its counsels on weather transformation.
The warning comes amid the first UK red excessive heat warning, with potentially life-threatening history highs near 40C anticipated as far north as York. As many as 4.6 million homes overheat, according to a recent survey and that’s only in England.
But until this summer no regulations governed overheating in new buildings. According to the deputy chair of the Climate Change Committee, he said We’ve been telling the government for over 10 years that we are nothing like well enough prepared in the UK for the really hot weather we are seeing now. He added we really do need to address the overheating risk in peoples’ homes.
The Climate Change Committee says that more than half a million new houses exposed to overheating have been built in the UK since it first submitted the problem nearly a decade ago. While the Met Office classes heatwaves as extreme weather events, scientific study shows that climate change is making them more likely.
Heatwaves caused an additional 2,000 deaths in 2020, according to the UK Health Security Agency. Much of the health risk is from the heat inside our homes, yet the government only brought in a regulation requiring new build homes to be tested for overheating in June this year. The lack of regulation is visible in the country’s housing stock, says James Prestwich of the Chartered Institute of Housing, which represents housing professionals.
Mr. Prestwich said we’ve seen buildings designed that don’t cope well with the increased temperatures we now experience in summer. Every heatwave we experience today has been made hotter because of the fossil fuels we have burned, she says. The hottest day of the year is, on average, already nearly 1C warmer than in the 1970s, says Dr. Vikki Thompson, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol Cabot Institute for the Environment.
Across Britain, lengthened periods of hot weather have folded in length since the period 1961-1990, she points out. South-east England has seen the greatest changes with a tripling of warm outbreaks.
