The government must take more responsibility for climate adaptation

This post is by Adrian Ramsay, Green MP for Waveney Valley, as part of our essay collection How to get Britain climate ready.

Without action from the top of government, adaptation to our changing climate risks becoming everyone’s responsibility and nobody’s job.

The reality is before our eyes. In the last few months, we’ve had intense periods of heat and, in June 2026, the UK’s highest temperature on record for that month was broken. Yet, when it comes to public debate, it is emissions targets and the decarbonisation of our economy that are discussed. Very little attention is paid to how we prepare the country for the impacts already arriving.

The recent Climate Change Committee’s (CCC’s) A well-adapted UK report could not be clearer: climate change is already affecting the UK, and the risks are growing rapidly. Flood damages could exceed £4 billion annually by mid-century. More than 90 per cent of homes could face overheating risks. Wildfire danger is expected to increase dramatically. Drier summers could leave the country with water shortages of more than five billion litres per day.

These are not distant possibilities, they are foreseeable challenges that will affect everyday life across the country. For too long, adaptation has been treated as an afterthought in climate policy. The CCC’s report should serve as a wake-up call. The question is no longer whether climate change will reshape life in Britain, it already is, but whether our institutions are prepared to respond.

As one of the relatively few MPs focused on climate adaptation, I have become increasingly convinced that the UK’s greatest weakness is not just a lack of funding or a lack of urgency in parliament. The Achilles’ heel is lack of co-ordination. The structures of government were built for challenges that fit neatly into departmental boxes. Climate breakdown and its impacts do not.

If a hospital needs repairing, responsibility sits with the Department of Health and Social Care. If we need new schools, that falls to the Department for Education. Most public policy problems can be allocated to a lead department. Climate resilience is all-encompassing in its nature, it cannot just be seen as an environmental issue. It affects food security, housing, public health, transport, energy, water supply, migration, national and international security all at once. Yet our system of government still treats these issues largely in isolation, and the department given responsibility to deal with it, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has neither the authority nor the budget to do so.

This siloed approach is even more magnified at the level of local authorities, regulators, devolved governments and public agencies. Climate impacts do not respect administrative boundaries. Floodwater does not stop at a council’s border. Heatwaves do not distinguish between areas. Yet, too often, our response is fragmented and under resourced, creating a dangerous gap between recognising the risks and acting on them. We know what is coming, but we lack the mechanisms to plan for and co-ordinate a national response to underpin, and properly resource, local action.

That is why I have urged the prime minister to establish a dedicated cabinet minister for climate adaptation and resilience, backed by a unit in Number 10 to drive delivery across government. Not to replace the responsibilities of existing departments, but to ensure they work together, overseeing the delivery of resilience objectives and ensuring that local authorities, regulators and devolved administrations also work towards shared national goals.

But structure alone isn’t enough. If we are to deliver the CCC’s minimum recommended level of action, £11 billion in annual investment is needed to prepare the country for future climate impacts. The CCC is clear that the costs of not taking this action will be greater than the cost of preparing properly.

Right now, the government is not joined up on this issue and the country is not prepared. Building a more resilient Britain requires more than stronger flood defences or cooler homes. It requires a government that is capable of thinking and acting beyond the typical Whitehall formula.

In the immediate term, more lives will be lost and the risks will continue to mount. Future generations will not simply judge us on whether we recognised the risks of climate breakdown, they will judge us on whether we acted on them to protect the public.

Adaptation, at its heart, is about protecting the places we call home, the public services we rely on and the communities we cherish. The sooner the government adopts a joined up approach to adaptation and treats it as a national priority, the better prepared Britain will be to protect future generations.