As summer temperatures increase, at night as well as during the day, people are becoming increasingly aware of how uncomfortable their homes can be but there isn’t an easy fix. One of my PhD supervisors reflects on the fact that part of the challenge is that the same homes are both too hot in summer and too cold in winter. We’re not, for the most part, trying to address one issue in one set of homes and the other issue in the rest of the homes. Yet we’re better equipped for dealing with the cold than we are the hot.

In the event of cold weather, most homes can be improved if you were to throw lots of money at it, without doing anything to the home. You could just subsidise people’s bills, or flat out pay the whole lot. It would be massively expensive and wasteful but still, there’s an immediate lever that could be pulled if we lived in a parallel universe and felt that something needed to be done. We already have an equivalent for cold weather of the Winter Fuel Discount and the Energy Bills Support Scheme in 2022.

Most homes have central heating, so to try and warm up the homes it’s then a case of having the heating on more. Census data from 2021 suggests that only c.1.2% of homes don’t have central heating so there are a lot of homes where it is then easier to provide funding towards the cost of energy to make it more affordable. For those households that aren’t using mains electricity or gas to power their central heating there would be more steps because they have to procure extra oil or solid fuel. If they already have this fuel system, this is something that they are used to doing and would have suppliers that they are able to contact to try and source supplies.

That isn’t the case in terms of cooling a home though. Even if you subsidised everyone’s bills in the same way to try and make the home cooler, there would be more steps in between. Some of that would involve getting more immediate cooling options such as fans or cooling units. Having invested in a fan the internet told me was whisper quiet and effective, which turned out not to be so, I don’t think we can assume that it’s quick or straightforward for people to get something which will make a difference. There are things that could be done but they aren’t quick – from shades, shutters and awnings to more hard-core air conditioning units. That means there are a lot more steps, which need a lot more levers.

This also suggests that where possible, it obviously doesn’t make sense for people to be coming up with separate but related proposals. Too often adaptation and mitigation can get separated out but in many cases it should be the same approach which addresses both, or could be the same approach with some tweaks. That if there are going to be works done to a home, they should be things that will make sense for as many of those scenarios as possible. Instead – as my supervisor’s work surfaces – they can work against each other. Measures to improve the ability of the home to retain the warmth in winter can, if not properly detailed and dealt with as part of a wider approach which considers ventilation, make the home warmer or more difficult to cool in summer too.

If vulnerability is a mix of the underlying circumstances and the extent to which you can or can’t adjust, then these heatwaves reflect how much more vulnerable we are to hotter weather than cold weather. The design of our buildings increases our vulnerability as the climate warms up because, for the most part, they aren’t designed to cope with this amount of heat, this regularly – particularly with nights where the temperature doesn’t drop that much. The fact we have much less ability and focus on managing in the heat than the cold will continue to exacerbate this. A lack of quick levers we can pull to try and help (some?) people in emergencies compounds all of this.

Addressing this vulnerability therefore needs a focus on both addressing the underlying conditions alongside the levers to provide more immediate support. To date the focus has been more on trying to address the way buildings operate or how we can use them differently. Reducing the vulnerability to extreme heat will need a more systems based approach to try and make a substantive difference, focusing on one aspect is better than nothing but ultimately has limitations.