East Anglia must prepare for climate extremities

This article first appeared in the Eastern Daily Press.

We talk about dangerous climate change, but what does it really look like? Often, it feels distant: graphs, melting ice far away, or disasters in other countries. These images make it seem abstract, not real, not here.

This feeling that climate decline isn’t tangible right now is a huge problem. Because it feels unreal or far-off, it’s hard to get people motivated to act.

Most efforts focus on pressuring governments to cut invisible gases (emissions). Let me be absolutely clear: Cutting emissions is vital… but it’s not the only solution nor the first solution, for it’s tough to rally people around something so invisible.

Adaptation fixes this

Adapting means getting ready for the damage that’s already happening, and getting worse. When we take action to protect ourselves, we’re showing we understand the reality. We make human-caused climate change real to ourselves through our human actions in response.

When we start meaningfully adapting to climate impacts, then suddenly any felt abstraction to climate reality dissipates.

Our luck is running out

Countries like the US and UK used to feel shielded from the worst climate impacts. That’s changing fast. The US faces massive hurricanes, wildfires, and floods: think Texas. Europe suffers severe droughts, fires, and floods too: think Valencia.

The UK has been lucky so far, avoiding truly massive disasters. But that luck won’t hold.

Climate chaos is already hitting the UK

  • 2024 saw the 2nd worst harvest on record due to water saturation, and the wild swings between drought and floods.
  • Flood alerts hit record highs early in 2024.
  • Flood insurance claims reached over £650 million last year – the highest ever. Increasingly, home insurance is being refused, or involves severe premium price increases.
  • Spring 2025 was the hottest and sunniest on record. Records keep breaking.

The climate is, self-evidently, getting worse, more chaotic. Right now, we’re heading into our third summer heatwave. While it might not hit 40°C like the record-breaker three years ago, every heatwave kills vulnerable people, especially the elderly.

And such heatwaves are of course now becoming more frequent and more extreme. East Anglia’s specific risks.

Different places face different climate threats. For us in East Anglia, the biggest danger is flooding. Our low-lying land is highly vulnerable to both coastal flooding (rising seas) and river flooding (rivers like the Ouse, Nene, Stour, Waveney, Wensum, and Yare). Almost nowhere here is truly safe from flood risk, once you take into account ‘flash-flooding’ too.

Wildfire is another growing threat, especially in dry summers like this one. If not this summer, then soon. East Anglia (and England generally) is very vulnerable to this threat because we have little experience dealing with large wildfires compared to places like Greece or California.

Ultimately what is at risk is our water- and food-security. In other words, will we have enough to eat? The stakes are that high.

How do we adapt?

Adaptation means taking practical steps now to reduce these risks:

  1. Build natural defences:
    • Restore wild woodland: trees help absorb water and slow potential floods.
    • Protect river banks: Use natural shrubs and hedges instead of concrete walls, where possible.
    • Restore wetlands and peatlands: Norfolk and East Anglia drained many salt marshes and mudflats, not to mention inland marshes and peatlands. Bringing them back creates huge natural sponges that soak up floodwaters and slow them down.
    • Or look at what they do over the water in the Netherlands: Consider the wonderful ‘tile-flipping’ (tegelwippen) annual competition between municipalities for who can take the most tiles out of public and private spaces and replace them with greenery. A brilliant way of ‘gamifying’ the endeavour to make towns and cities flood-proof, climate-proof.
  2. Build stronger communities:
    • When disasters hit – and they will hit – the most crucial factor for survival is community. Neighbours who check on each other, sharing food, water, and shelter, make all the difference. Building strong local connections isn’t just nice; it’s a vital form of climate adaptation. A strong community can mean life instead of death.

Why adaptation is essential

In the 1980s, when we first widely learned about “global warming,” preventing the worst through drastic emissions cuts (mitigation) was still possible. We’ve largely missed that chance. A significant amount of climate change is now unavoidable.

The impacts will hit our communities. It’s our collective responsibility to adapt. We must prepare for the reality of climate breakdown so we are ready when disasters strike.

Join us

At the Climate Majority Project, we’ve launched this week our SAFER campaign (Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience) to finally put adaptation into widespread action.

This is about making our communities safer against the climate impacts already here and those on the way. For climate vulnerability is now, here. Let’s stop just talking about invisible gases.

Let’s get ready. Join us in building real resilience for East Anglia and beyond.