National
Heat
Risk
Commission
In July 2022, the temperature in the United Kingdom passed forty degrees for the first time in recorded history. Runways softened. Rails buckled. Hospitals filled. Wildfires took hold in London suburbs. Nearly three thousand people died from heat-related causes that summer. Most of them did not need to.
The National Heat Risk Commission is an independent commission established to help the UK prepare for the growing risks of extreme heat.
Heat is not like the hazards our resilience systems were built to handle. A flood has a perimeter. A storm has a track. Heat has neither. It is an invisible transfer of energy that moves through bodies, buildings, materials, networks and ecosystems all at once, and it does so silently.
The consequences ripple across every sector. Heat strains hospitals and care homes. It buckles railways and softens roads. It surges electricity demand at the moment generation efficiency falls. It dries reservoirs, stresses crops, slows construction sites, empties classrooms and damages habitats. And it compounds with other hazards, with air pollution, with drought, with wildfire.
This is a systemic hazard. It demands a systemic response.
The United Kingdom is being tested by pressures that arrive together: geopolitical instability, rapidly changing information environments, technological change, strain on public trust, and mounting pressure on the natural systems that underpin human life. National resilience is the capacity to absorb shocks, adapt to changing conditions, and continue functioning under pressures that arrive from many directions at once.
Within that wider picture, heat is one strand. But it is a strand for which the institutional architecture is conspicuously thin. Flooding has a national strategy, a lead agency and dedicated capital programmes. Heat does not. France, Spain, Germany and others have moved further than we have on heat governance, and there is much to learn from their experience.
The Commission's work is intended to support, not substitute for, the broader national effort on resilience. Our case is not that heat matters more than other hazards. It is that the gap between the scale of the risk and the scale of the current response is wider for heat than for almost any other climate hazard this country faces.
Heat does not affect everyone equally, and the pattern is not random. There is who is exposed: people in poorly insulated homes, top-floor flats, dense urban areas with little green space, workplaces without cooling. There is who is most sensitive: older people, infants, pregnant women, people with cardiovascular, respiratory and mental health conditions. And there is who can adapt: those with the resources, security and agency to change their homes, their work or their travel.
In each dimension, the burden tracks existing patterns of disadvantage. Heat risk is not only a public health question. It bears on the country's social and economic trajectory, and on the resilience of the institutions that underpin both.
The case for action on heat has been made in this country for more than a decade. Parliamentary committees have examined it. The Climate Change Committee has reported on it. The UK Health Security Agency has documented the deaths, the admissions, the patterns. Universities, research institutes, civil society organisations and frontline practitioners have contributed a substantial and coherent body of evidence.
The country does not lack analysis. It lacks delivery. Recommendations made in the early 2010s are being repeated, almost word for word, in the mid 2020s. Every year of further delay is paid for in lives, in pounds, in productivity and in trust.
The Commission will publish an interim report in summer 2026 and a final report in summer 2027. The final report is not an endpoint. It is intended as a reference point for sustained action far beyond the life of the Commission itself.
We are an independent body. We do not deliver programmes, set regulations or operate services. What we can do is provide an authoritative evidence base, identify where action is most needed, and offer a shared reference point that others can use with confidence.
Three audiences matter most:
Countries that build resilience to heat are countries with healthier citizens and fewer preventable deaths. They have cooler homes, cooler schools, cooler workplaces and more reliable public services. They are countries where the industries of adaptation, including cooling technologies, retrofit, resilient design, and climate data and modelling, are growing rather than imported. They protect the natural systems on which resilience ultimately depends, from urban trees and green space to rivers, wetlands and soils.
Action on heat is not in tension with the United Kingdom's wider ambitions on health, growth, infrastructure and the transition to a low-carbon economy. It is part of the same project.
The summer of 2022 showed us the country we have. The work ahead is to build the country we need. We invite contributions from every part of it.