Joshua Wells: If we imagine someone who is Gen Z today reaching their 50s, what does the climate landscape look like for them? How different is it from today?
Andrew Russell: By the 2050s, flood risk is going to have increased further, particularly surface-water flooding. When you get really heavy rainfall in urban environments, you’ve covered over permeable surfaces like gardens and fields, so the water runs straight into the sewers and floods back up.
That’s likely to become one of the bigger flooding issues throughout the 21st century. It’s also one we’ve invested least in and one of the hardest to protect against. With river or coastal flooding, you can build big defences. Surface-water flooding is different because you don’t know exactly where these storms are going to hit.
We know storms are likely to become more intense, and you can get thunderstorms dumping a huge amount of water in a very small area.
Then there are heatwaves. What we’re seeing now could be a normal summer by the 2050s, and then you’ll have extremes beyond that.
Wildfires are another issue. We didn’t talk about them much in older UK climate-risk assessments, but it’s becoming clear they’re going to be significant. Climate change doesn’t cause wildfires, but it creates the conditions in which they can happen much more easily.
I was at the Green Man Festival recently and one of the roads into the festival was closed because the area around it was on fire. That caused disruption to the local village and they cancelled the traditional burning of the Green Man at the end.
Those might sound like small things, but you’re going to see more disruption to everyday life.
Heatwaves and wildfires can also contribute to drought, restrictions on water use and risks to food security. Crops we’ve grown for hundreds of years may not remain sustainable in the same way, so we may have to change agricultural practices quite significantly.
There are also possible risks from diseases and pests. Our climate currently limits the ability of some species, such as mosquitoes, to thrive here, but those conditions could move north. There’s uncertainty around that, but it is a recognised climate risk.
The really important point is that this is an international and intergenerational issue. Gen Z will experience serious impacts, but the people who suffer the most may be generations who haven’t even been born yet.
Joshua: Climate models have been making predictions for decades, based on their historic accuracy and progress made with modelling. How much confidence should we have in projections about the 2050s?
Andrew: It depends on the scale you’re looking at.
You can go back more than a century to Svante Arrhenius, who looked at what would happen if you increased CO₂ in the atmosphere. His projections about global average temperatures were pretty good.
Since then, the models, the physics and the computing have become much more sophisticated. We can now move from asking what happens to global average temperatures to looking at regions and individual countries.
There’s more uncertainty as you go down to those smaller scales, but if you’re asking about average climate conditions, we can be pretty confident. Temperatures will rise and you’ll have more extremes around that average, including more heatwaves.
For the UK, we can also be reasonably confident about wetter winters and hotter, drier summers, although within those hotter summers you may also get more intense thunderstorms.
People sometimes compare climate projections to weather forecasts and say: if we can’t forecast the weather accurately weeks ahead, how can we know what the climate will be like decades from now?
But they’re different problems. We can’t tell you what the weather will be on a particular day in 2076. We can say something meaningful about what average climate conditions are likely to look like in the UK by then.
Joshua: How does climate change interact with other problems Gen Z already face?
Andrew: Housing is probably the first thing that comes to mind.
Younger people generally have lower salaries and less disposable income, so they’re less likely to be able to afford homes that are resilient to climate change.
Even with the government talking about building large numbers of new homes, I don’t think we’ve thought nearly enough about how those homes will cope with future conditions.
I recently stayed in a new block of flats in Birmingham. It wasn’t particularly warm outside, but the building was sweltering because it hadn’t been designed properly for heat. There was no effective cooling and it was on a noisy street, so opening the windows wasn’t really an option.
That is housing stock that could exist for another 50 years and it can’t cope particularly well with today’s climate.
Flooding raises an even bigger issue. We have Flood Re, which helps deal with flood-insurance risk, but under the current arrangements it only runs until 2039. Houses built more recently aren’t necessarily covered in the same way either.
At the same time, we haven’t done enough to achieve property-level flood resilience: things like flood doors, one-way valves, waterproof materials, or moving electrical sockets higher up the walls.
So there’s a risk that a significant part of the housing stock becomes increasingly difficult or expensive to insure against flooding.
Insurance companies aren’t altruistic. There’s no automatic right to insurance. If they don’t think they can make the numbers work, they won’t insure a property.
Then what happens? Does the state step in? Does the homeowner take the risk personally? Do we end up effectively writing off some houses?
That’s particularly important for Gen Z because they’re already struggling to get into the housing market.
Joshua: Could that eventually undermine trust in homeownership itself?
Andrew: Yes, and I think the bigger issue there is trust in authority.
Previous generations have often taken for granted a fairly simple pathway: get a job, save money, buy a house, have a family.
That’s becoming harder anyway, but climate risk adds another layer. The properties younger people can afford may be the ones that are most exposed to flooding or overheating.
From an intergenerational justice perspective, I think younger people have a reason to be angry.
Older generations benefited economically from activities where the environmental damage wasn’t properly reflected in the cost, and they often won’t face the worst consequences.
Meanwhile, younger and future generations inherit more of the risk.
Climate change is therefore going to exacerbate an intergenerational inequality that already exists around housing, wealth and economic security.
Joshua: What kinds of adaptation policy would most benefit Gen Z?
Andrew: We’ve never really had a coherent adaptation policy in the UK.
We’ve had successive National Adaptation Programmes, but when I worked at the Climate Change Committee, we kept finding that the Government often pointed to policies that already existed elsewhere rather than introducing new measures specifically designed to address future climate risks.
Flooding is a good example. We spend a lot of money on it, but much of that is dealing with the situation we already have.
The bigger question is how we move towards homes, infrastructure and environments that are actually resilient to the risks we know are coming.
That requires long-term planning, and we haven’t really thought it through at a national level.
Education is another good example. Students take many important exams in May and June, when heatwaves are becoming more common.
If students in one school are sitting exams in a poorly ventilated hall during a heatwave, while students in a wealthier area have much better facilities, that can create another source of inequality.
So adaptation isn’t just flood defences. It’s housing, schools, transport, health services and the way everyday systems are designed.
One area where I think we may be even further behind is international supply chains. We rely on a huge amount from overseas, whether that’s food, electronics or other goods. If a climate event disrupts production somewhere else in the world, that can very quickly become a problem for the UK too.
A few years ago, for example, a major storm in South-East Asia disrupted semiconductor production and that fed through into shortages elsewhere. You can imagine the same kind of thing happening with food or other goods we import. So adaptation isn’t only about making the UK itself more resilient; it’s also about thinking about how resilient the international systems we depend on are.
Joshua: You’ve also pointed to risks outside the UK, particularly supply chains. Does adaptation mean reducing our dependence on vulnerable international systems?
Andrew: There are basically three ways to manage a risk.
You can mitigate the hazard, in this case, reduce emissions and limit climate change.
You can reduce your exposure, which might mean producing more things domestically or deciding you don’t need them.
Or you reduce your vulnerability, which can mean helping make the systems you rely on more resilient.
For international supply chains, that might point towards having a serious overseas development-aid programme and maintaining influence abroad.
That can sound separate from UK climate policy, but it isn’t. If countries we depend on for food, electronics or other goods are badly affected by climate hazards, that affects us too.
The same goes for migration. Countries that have historically contributed least to climate change may experience some of the greatest impacts. If those places become less habitable or agriculture collapses, there will be consequences far beyond their borders.
Cutting support for resilience overseas can therefore be quite short-sighted.
There’s another issue here as well, which is what happens when risks start compounding or cascading. We’ve probably thought much less about that than we should have.
You might have one major event that is already stretching emergency services, and then another event follows immediately afterwards. Or one event creates knock-on problems elsewhere in the system. That’s where things can become much harder to manage.
Joshua: You also mentioned “cascading risks”. What does that mean in practice?
Andrew: It’s what happens when one event creates another problem, or when several major events happen consecutively.
Say you have a long drought and emergency services are dealing with that. Then you suddenly get intense rainfall. Because the ground is so dry, the water runs straight off and you get flooding.
Do we have the people, equipment and planning capacity to deal with both?
Or imagine a flood knocks out the power. Hospitals may still have electricity, so people start converging on hospitals simply to charge phones or access services.
Or a bridge is damaged and suddenly emergency routes are disrupted.
The risks start interacting with each other.
We haven’t done enough analysis of whether our emergency-response systems are genuinely prepared for multiple major events happening together or one after another.
There are short-term things we can do, but if you keep avoiding the long-term planning, then the “short term” just goes on forever.
Joshua: Is lack of political will the main barrier to adaptation? And are there reasons to be optimistic for Gen Z?
Andrew: The biggest reason for optimism is probably renewable energy.
Renewables have become much cheaper, while fossil fuels remain exposed to enormous geopolitical risks.
Eventually, I think economics will win a large part of the mitigation battle. Fossil fuels are expensive and vulnerable to international disruption.
The sooner the UK can reduce its dependence on international gas prices and build a more secure domestic energy system, the better off we’ll be financially and in terms of energy security — while also reducing emissions.
Political will can speed that up.
The problem is that simple short-term arguments are often politically attractive. You can say, for example, that opening new North Sea gas fields will help the UK, because that sounds straightforward even though the underlying problem is much more complicated.
There also needs to be a just transition. People who currently work in oil and gas need realistic alternatives and somewhere to move to economically.
Adaptation is harder politically than mitigation in some ways.
Mitigation can involve big, exciting infrastructure projects: a nuclear power station, a huge offshore wind farm, major investment announcements.
Adaptation is often much less glamorous. It’s insulating buildings, retrofitting houses, improving drainage, making schools cooler and doing lots of small pieces of infrastructure work.
It’s hard, dirty work.
But those measures can deliver enormous benefits in resilience, jobs and economic activity.
The basic problem is not that we don’t know what to do. In many areas, we know exactly what we need to do.
We just haven’t done it.
There’s also a difficulty with investment because climate adaptation is about avoiding future losses. You can spend a huge amount replacing a flood barrier and, in theory, never experience the exact event that proves the investment was necessary.
With energy infrastructure, by contrast, you know the asset will be used and somebody will make money from it.
That makes it much easier to attract political attention and private investment.
So there are reasons to be optimistic, particularly around energy and technology. But adaptation still requires a lot more political effort than we’ve been willing to give it.
Dods Political Intelligence’s ongoing research collaboration with Queen Mary University of London brings together academic expertise and political intelligence to provide public affairs professionals with tailored expert insights and analysis on UK politics and policy. We are actively exploring a research project to better understand the nature of the challenges that Gen Z face, and how these challenges can be measured via a typology of hardship.
If you wish to know more about this project, or are interested in how we can develop a tailored research project to support your public affairs objectives, please contact us here.