As the UK swelters under its second heatwave in as many months, many are finding that the places we live are not built to withstand the extreme weather.
Reports over the last few days have seen MRI scanners failing and schools closing due to a lack of cooling systems, making it clear that our infrastructure is not coping.
On Wednesday, a rare red heat-health warning issued by the Met Office was extended to Friday night, covering South Wales, parts of the South of England and the Midlands. The warning has now been downgraded to amber to match the rest of the country and remains in place until tomorrow night.
Nowhere is the health risk more pronounced than in the UK’s cities, where the ‘urban heat island effect’, where heat is trapped in building and built up areas, meaning it can feel several degrees warmer than the thermometer reading.
The i Paper has asked experts from across industries to tell us how we can adapt all the UK’s cities to be able to withstand the heat.
Starting at home
‘Heat Ready London’, a report launched by Sir Sadiq Khan on Thursday as the UK recorded its second record-breaking hottest ever June day in a row, sets out a vision for keeping the capital cool in the face of “increasingly frequent and severe heatwaves”.
The report, which focuses on protecting the health of all Londoners but particularly those vulnerable to heat such as young children and the elderly, identifies more than a million homes at risk of overheating, along with 1,300 schools, 60 hospitals and 351 care homes.
Caption: A person cools off with fresh water from a water fountain, by the beach in Hove, on the south coast of England. (Photo by CARLOS JASSO / AFP via Getty Images)Since 2008, new homes in London have to be designed with cooling in mind. This was made into a national policy in 2021, suggesting the rest of the country should be looking to London for an indication of where we might be going with other heat-proofing measures.
The Greater London Authority is now looking how existing homes can be retro-fitted to make them cooler, focussing on “shutters, insulation and ventilation, and air-conditioning”.
Chris Hocknell, director of Eight Versa which helps building companies to “future-proof” their projects, explained that making sure light and heat can’t get in through windows is one of the most important ways to keep houses cool.
He said: “It’s not just the air temperature that heats up space. It’s also direct solar radiation, that’s one of the worst things, because that carries much more thermal energy than air.”
“Our European cousins have been doing this for centuries. If you go and look at houses in Spain, they have shutters,” he said, explaining that we should expect windows on urban houses to look very different in a few years.
“You’ll probably have uPVC windows as opposed to timber ones, which certainly wouldn’t have single glazing,” he said. Special glass might also be used to reflect the sun away, which can look darker or green-tinged.
Replacing timber with uPVC kelps keep hot air out, as does double glazing the window panes. (Photo: Getty).Insulation could be added to roofs to keep rooms on the top floor, which can be some of the hottest places in the house, cooler.
John Stubbs, founder of sustainable paint company YesColours, also pointed out that painting rooves a lighter colour can help reduce internal temperatures.
He said: “Traditional dark roofs absorb solar radiation, whereas clean white roofs reflect up to 80 per cent of sunlight. This can decrease indoor temperatures by roughly 1°C to 5°C.”
Tree-lined streets and ‘living walls’
The “green over grey” rule of thumb has been around among climate experts and urban planning professionals for a while, the idea being that trees and parks help to cool down surrounding areas whilst providing a shady refuge.
In London, “managing and expanding tree cover” is a key part of the Heat Ready plan, including “using greening in or around buildings”.
Tree-lined streets provide shade for surrounding houses as well as pedestrians and drivers. (Photo: Richard Newstead/Getty Images)A ‘living wall’ of plants in Regent’s Street, installed by Vertical Meadow, recorded a temperature 20°C below the street level on Thursday, which could prompt the installation of more of them across cities.
Westminster City Council is now requiring greening on strategic construction sites across the borough, with cooling, biodiversity and improved public realm among the key benefits.
Getting around in comfort
Even if we succeed in cooling buildings in the UK’s cities, residents will still need to get to and from work, school, and other places. At the moment, this one of the highest-risk areas, with people collapsing on public transport or in the street due to heat exhaustion.
While plans are in place in London to introduce air conditioning on more Tube lines and explore the use of “heat-resistant materials”, in other cities where transport isn’t underground, the focus will be on cooling roads and pavements.
Pavements in London reach sweltering surface temperatures according to thermal camera footage captured for Greenpeace UK during the record-breaking heatwave (Photo: TI Thermal Imaging / Greenpeace United Kingdom) Pavements, Tube platforms and bus shelters across London reach sweltering surface temperatures according to thermal camera footage captured for Greenpeace UK during the record-breaking heatwave. (Photo: TI Thermal Imaging / Greenpeace United Kingdom)“We need fewer cars on our streets to bring down on-street temperatures, and much more tree cover, focusing on the most deprived and nature-deprived areas where residents and workers are at high risk, ” said Izzy Romilly, head of urban transformations at Possible, which campaigns to make environmentally friendly lifestyles accessible for all.
“Re-imagining how we use our roads and replacing car parking with trees, places to sit, community green spaces and bike parking are all part of the solution,” she said.
What about air conditioning?
A network of ‘cool spaces‘ with air conditioning is already in place in London, similar to the ‘warm welcome’ programme showing places with central heating in winter, and there are plans to expand it to other cities according to Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Independent National Heat Risk Commission.
“This is about making sure that people who are not cooling off in their homes have somewhere safe to go to lower temperatures,” she said.
The London plan mainly aims to use what are known as ‘passive’ cooling measures, such as imrpoving air circulation, to reduce the need for ‘active’ measures such as air conditioning, which require electricity and therefore increase carbon emissions.
This is unlikely to be enough to keep city-dwellers in the years to come, though, according to Chris Hocknell.
“When you’re designing a building, there’s a point where you exhaust all your passive mechanisms for cooling and you witch to active,” he explained. “We’ve reached this limit now where the old, low-tech solutions are going to stop working – it doesn’t matter how much you open a window, when you’ve got 35°C air blasting in your face, you’re going to be too hot.”
He thinks “anywhere that has vulnerable adults or children” should get air conditioning installed as we move into a future where extreme heat becomes the norm.
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