There are different aspects to vulnerability and adaptation – some relate to physical aspects and some to capability – and the current heatwave in parts of the UK are showing both elements of that, but I’m particularly interested in the social elements of it. The social and cultural elements of adaptation, as with mitigation, are challenging but unlocking those aspects could then help provide the resources needed to deal with the physical aspects.
I’m, very slowly and a bit brain foggily, writing this piece as where I live in the UK experiences a heatwave and it doesn’t currently feel like actively enjoyable weather. I haven’t sleep well last night as it was too stifling, with no breeze. The room felt suffocating, I eventually got up and went outside where it was a bit cooler. Today I’m really not feeling very awake or engaged and I’m lucky enough to be able to arrange my work activities to do things that don’t require so much brain power. I was out in the hot, hot heat as I had an event to go to but it really didn’t feel like a good idea.
Yet I’ve heard and read lots of people describing it as nice or good weather – even as they might otherwise be talking about how uncomfortable the heat is. This does not seem like good weather to me, and nor does it seem like they actually think it is when they talk about different elements of their experience.
Perhaps the reason adaptation struggles to get much traction is that in the UK people associate ‘bad weather’ with rain, wind and cold weather. By contrast, hot weather can often be considered to be good weather – in part because of the conception that it’s really rainy and you can never trust it to be sunny in the summer. Hence the cultural idea of having a rainy Bank Holiday BBQ or rain-lashed picnic in the car. The idea that sunny weather could be ‘bad’ doesn’t fit with that view and so then the default for many is to describe it as good, even as they might talk about the impacts negatively.
While some impacts of hot weather can be obvious – such as wildfires, train cancellations or sunburn – it can be less so than floods or heavy snowfall where the impact is more visually obvious. If there are fatalities as a result of flooding or snowfall it tends to be more immediate and clearer to see the connection, whereas with heatwaves it can be harder to tell. Often people die as a result of an underlying condition which is exacerbated by the hot weather. These deaths show up as ‘excess deaths’ which is not a mechanism that is as easily communicated or has the same clarity of cause and effect.
However, a consistent message in the literature is that people underestimate the impacts and are reluctant to take action, even where it will affect them. In relation to flooding which has historically been more common than heatwaves, people can underestimate the likelihood of being affected, as the title of Burningham et al’s 2008 piece ‘‘It’ll never happen to me’: understanding public awareness of local flood risk’ suggests. Research on attitudes to and behaviours undertaken in heatwaves from by Erens et al (2021) found that people who were the most vulnerable or potentially vulnerable to heatwaves didn’t realise they could be affected and only a quarter of potentially vulnerable people changed their behaviour. Research by the British Red Cross found relatively high levels of understanding of actions that could be taken, yet there was a significant drop-off in the number of people who actually took action.
Helping to shift that narrative and getting people to engage with the fact this isn’t good weather for many feels like a pre-condition to then take steps to adapt to it. In the absence of that understanding, it is unsurprising people wouldn’t take action. It’s something that happens to other people rather than to them, until it isn’t of course.
London School of Economics research suggests there is a low expectation among people that government is taking sufficient steps to respond. This could partly be projection by them but also seems to be outsourcing responsibility to a government that is unlikely to be getting lobbied on this by people who don’t think it’s an issue for them. All in all it’s currently quite a hot mess and likely to keep getting hotter unless we can find a way to recognise how things really are and go from there.
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