Mayor urged to step up efforts to protect London from extreme heat

The Mayor of London must prioritise cooling homes and planting more trees to help the city deal with future heatwaves, experts have warned.

Londoners this month faced both a “high” pollution alert as well as an amber heat warning, from soaring temperatures and high ozone levels as sunshine reacts with any present pollution.

A London Assembly report last year confirmed high pollution days were now a “rare occurrence” in the capital, but this week’s warning raised questions over the Mayor’s strategy for protecting Londoners from increasing temperatures.

City Hall is currently developing London’s Heat Risk delivery plan, which officials say will “better prepare London for rising temperatures and extreme heat from climate change”.

After a fourth heat wave this year the Mayor is urged to focus on protecting homes from overheating and installing fountains, like other European cities, to help cool neighbourhoods.

Sophie O’Connell, senior policy adviser at think tank Green Alliance, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “Londoners will struggle with hotter temperatures than they are used to in the coming years, and the Met Office predicts that heatwaves could stick around for a month or more.

“We know that older people and those on lower incomes suffer the worst health effects from overheating homes.

“So in his upcoming Heat Plan for London, the Mayor should prioritise preparing our homes for heat: making sure they’re shaded, encourage air flow and limit the heat absorbed through the roof.

“Given many Londoners don’t have a garden, it’s good news we’ll see more trees planted to provide shade, but we also need more cooling water features like fountains in poorer neighbourhoods,” she said.

City Hall currently offers some cool spaces and water refill stations around London to try and mitigate the effects of hot weather, but these are few and far between. The Mayor of London has also laid out plans to increase London’s tree canopy cover by 10 per cent by 2050 to further cool the city.

Zoë Garbett, Green Party London Assembly Member, told the LDRS: “We’re living through a climate crisis, and as temperatures continue to rise, too many Londoners are trapped in homes that turn dangerously hot.

“This isn’t just poor design, it’s another layer of the housing emergency, driven by private developers operating without proper oversight. Alongside unaffordable homes, skyrocketing rents and mouldy homes, we’re now facing a wave of new builds that can’t cope with extreme heat.

“Homes with high temperatures put lives at risk, from sleepless nights to serious heart and breathing problems. And the impacts aren’t felt equally, with social housing tenants being hit hardest, with two-thirds facing the greatest risk.

“Everyone deserves a home that’s safe, affordable and built for the future, not ones that puts our health on the line,” she said.

Opponents of the Mayor’s environmental strategy, which has included the ULEZ charge on polluting cars and aims to make London a Net Zero city by 2030, say he is focusing on the wrong measures to clean up and cool London’s air.

Thomas Turrell, the environment spokesperson for the City Hall Conservatives, told the LDRS: “Labour is going about it all wrong in the fight against pollution in Greater London.

“The Mayor has pulled the rug from under our electric vehicle market with his plans to force them to pay the congestion charge, plans to concrete over London’s lungs with his anti-greenbelt campaign, and greenwashed his actions with publicity stunts like seeds given out at Tube stations. London deserves a Mayor who is serious about giving Londoners clean air.”

After hot weather in summer 2022 caused 387 excess deaths in London, a report from the independent London Climate Resilience Review said the city must “better prepare” for severe floods and heatwaves caused by climate change.

Deputy Mayor Mete Coban said: “The first thing that we’re doing is publishing a cool spaces map so we are signposting places to residents where they can go to cool off.

“The second thing that we’re doing is making sure we have much more water refill points — over 4,000 across the city — to make sure Londoners stay hydrated.

“[Through] our tree planting programme especially to create that shade, the Mayor has planted over 600,000 trees across the city since 2016.”

London Heat Risk Delivery Plan.

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