Committee on Climate Change

Climate prediction becomes more difficult when looking beyond global changes to smaller scales. Despite this, there are emerging findings about what climate change might mean for the UK. Agriculture, housing, flood risk, biodiversity, energy supply and demand, water availability and health are all likely to be affected.

Even with strong international action on mitigation to stabilise global temperatures at around 2°C, past and present emissions mean that the climate in the UK will continue to change and the UK will need to respond to this.

The

provides independent advice to the UK Government on what action the UK should take to prepare current and  future climate change impacts.

The UK’s climate is already changing. Temperatures are 1°C higher on average than they were in the 1970s and Spring now arrives 11 days earlier. 

Recent UKCP09 projections show:

• sea level rise in coastal areas;
• more frequent extremes of flooding, heat-waves and drought;
• a reduction in frost days and snow cover;
• milder, wetter winters, with potential rainfall increases in the West;
• hotter, drier summers, with potential rainfall decreases in the South East; and
• greater average warming in the South, and less pronounced warming in the Scottish Isles.

How climate change might affect maximum summer temperatures in the UK, under a medium (business-as-usual) emissions scenario

Source: UKCP09

The impacts of global warming are likely to increase as a result of future climate change, and so, the UK needs to start taking action to prepare and ensure that we have the resilience to cope.

Find out more about climate science,  global climate change risks, climate change models and global emissions trajectories out to 2050.