Inequality Knocks Again

How wealth inequality exacerbates the risks of extreme heat in the UK, and what to do about it

We've had three heatwaves in the UK in the last month, the first of which caused hundreds of deaths in London alone. Saturday was the third anniversary of the day in 2022 in which temperatures in Britain breached 40 degrees for the first time. Last week, a Met Office report on the state of the UK climate said that extreme weather is the UK's new normal, while scientists have recently warned that extreme heat could lead to 30,000 deaths a year in England and Wales by the 2070s.

The ways in which poverty and income inequality exacerbate the impacts of heatwave risks on vulnerable people are reasonably well understood, but we don’t yet fully appreciate the complex and wide-ranging ways in which wealth inequality worsen heatwave risks, both for the most vulnerable and for society as a whole.

To explore this issue in more depth, the Fairness Foundation, with the Future Threats Lab and the Policy Institute at King’s College London, ran a workshop for 25 experts in climate resilience, vulnerability and inequality. The workshop examined how wealth inequality in the UK affects our ability to respond to extreme heat events both by increasing vulnerability for particular groups and for society as a whole, and by undermining the effectiveness of heatwave adaptation measures.

The report that came out of the workshop has just been published, and sets out the key evidence, a summary of the expert discussion and some lessons learned from running the event (PDF version here). The workshop followed a report that we published last October on the impacts of wealth inequality (and policy responses to it), and a workshop in November looking at the impacts of wealth inequality on societal resilience.

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