UK seeks to map risks to public services of extreme weather

(Bloomberg) — Extreme weather is having a measurable impact on Britain’s public finances, as areas including railways, prisons and healthcare are increasingly affected, Britain’s National Audit Office said.

But the full extent of the damage is still difficult to gauge because many government departments have not provided the information needed for a proper assessment, the NAO said in a report published on Monday.

“Parliament needs clear information about the resilience of infrastructure, service delivery and finance to climate change and how these risks are being managed,” Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said in a statement. “We expect this review to become more useful over time.”

This is the first year that major UK government departments have had to publish full details of the risks they face from global warming. In many cases, efforts to understand such exposures remain at an early stage, the NAO said. The disclosures are necessary to allow lawmakers to monitor how the UK’s public services are prepared.

Britons are facing increasingly severe – and in some cases deadly – periods of extreme heat followed by flash floods. Intense heat has already caused damage to roads and railways and left schools and hospitals dangerously hot this summer. At the same time, flooding is becoming more frequent and more destructive to key infrastructure such as railways.

Flooding was the most common hazard identified in the information monitored by the NAO. Around 89% of prisons face a high risk of flooding, while sites managed by the National Health Service experienced 391 floods in 2024–25. Among the many impacts of overheating is a tendency towards more violence in prisons, the NAO report found.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chairman of the UK Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, commented on the NAO’s findings: “The government still has work to do, particularly in setting meaningful targets.” “Better reporting is encouraging, but Parliament and the public need more than just a list of risks: they need to know how the government is prepared to manage them.”

More such stories are available at bloomberg.com