Adapting

How to start adapting to a changing climate

Cutting carbon is only half the job. The climate is already changing, and heat, flooding, storms and drought are already costing organisations money. A first climate risk assessment needs half a dozen people, a list of your sites and an afternoon.

By Richard Harvie · Updated November 2026 · 7 minute read

In short

Adaptation means preparing your buildings, services and people for the weather that is coming, as well as cutting the emissions that cause it.
Start with a climate risk assessment: the right people in a room, four questions and a simple score for each risk, today and around 2050.
Put the biggest risks on the corporate risk register with owners who control the budget, and build adaptation into the plans you already have.

Why it matters

On 19 July 2022, the day the UK first reached 40°C, the two data centres running the IT systems for Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals in London overheated and failed. They were meant to back each other up. In the heat, both went down, and doctors could not see patient records or scan results. Very little in that story was a surprise: the heat was forecast and the weak points were known. Nobody had joined the dots between the weather and the building, and in most organisations that is nobody's job. A climate risk assessment makes it somebody's.

Who to invite

Invite whoever looks after your buildings, IT, vehicles, health and safety and HR, and at least one person who runs a front-line service. Ask a health and safety representative too, and a trade union representative if you recognise a union. They often hear first about the van cabin that is too hot or the yard that floods.

Four questions

What hazards could affect us? For most UK organisations the list is heat, flooding from heavy rain, rivers or the sea, storms and power cuts, drought and, for sites next to heathland, moorland or farmland, wildfire.
Which sites are exposed? Go through each building, depot and car park in turn.
Which services would stop? Think about what happens if a site closes, staff cannot get in or systems fail.
Which people would be harmed? Staff who work outdoors or in hot buildings, and service users who are older, very young or unwell, are usually most at risk.

Start with your own history: which sites have flooded, overheated or lost power in the last five years. The facilities helpdesk log, the IT team's record of outages and past insurance claims will fill in what memories miss.

Fill the gaps from free sources

Flood maps. The Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service shows the risk from rivers, the sea and surface water for any address in England, and Natural Resources Wales, SEPA and the Department for Infrastructure in Northern Ireland offer similar maps. Check surface water in particular: around 4.6 million properties in England are at risk from it, almost twice as many as from rivers and the sea.
Climate projections. The Met Office's projections show how your area's climate is expected to change.
Your Local Resilience Forum. In England and Wales, each one publishes a community risk register of the emergencies local services plan for.
People. Your insurer, your neighbours and, above all, your own staff, who usually know which corner of the car park floods and which office is unbearable in July.

Score each risk

For each risk, give a score from 1 to 5 for how likely it is and how bad it would be, then multiply the two. Score each risk twice, once for today and once for around 2050, because a building, boiler or vehicle you buy now may still be in use then.

Score	Likelihood	Impact
1	Rare: less than once in 20 years	Minor: a few hours of disruption, little cost
2	Unlikely: once in 10 to 20 years	Some disruption for a day or so; a small repair bill
3	Possible: once in 5 to 10 years	A site or service down for several days; a noticeable cost
4	Likely: once in 2 to 5 years	A service stopped for a week or more, possible harm to people, or a large cost
5	Almost certain: most years	Serious harm to people, a service lost for weeks, or major cost or damage to reputation

A total of 1 to 4 is low, 5 to 9 medium, 10 to 14 high and 15 to 25 very high. The first version will be rough, and that is fine. A rough assessment that leads to action is worth more than a perfect one that takes a year.

Put the risks where they get managed

Put the highest risks on your corporate risk register, each with an owner. Choose owners who control the budget to fix the problem, such as the facilities manager for an overheating building or the IT manager for a server room, rather than giving them all to the sustainability lead. That is the moment adaptation stops being a sustainability topic and becomes part of how the organisation manages risk.

Build it into the plans you already have

When I taught people to drive, nobody booked a separate course for driving in the rain. If it rained, the rain became part of that day's lesson. Adaptation works best the same way: a separate plan tends to sit on a shelf, while a climate question added to the plans you already have gets acted on.

Plans that manage risk. Test business continuity plans against a week-long heatwave, a flooded depot and a three-day power cut. Talking it through hour by hour usually finds more gaps than reading the plan.
Plans that spend money. Design new buildings and refurbishments for the climate expected over their life, and use replacement cycles: when a boiler is due, choose a heat pump that can also cool.
Everyday policies. Agree a hot weather policy in spring rather than in the middle of a heatwave, put temperature alarms in server rooms, and make sure backups do not depend on a single building.

Heat is the hazard most organisations underestimate. There is no legal maximum temperature for indoor workplaces in the UK; the Health and Safety Executive says only that the temperature should normally be at least 16°C, or 13°C for strenuous work, and that employers must keep it at a comfortable level. A few cheap temperature loggers left in place for a summer will show which rooms overheat and for how long.

Finally, review the plan after every severe weather event, while people still remember the details: what happened, what worked and what do we change?

Sources

Rules and figures checked in November 2026. They change, so check the current version before you rely on them.