04 Mar 2025
CIH and CaCHE publish new discussion paper: Turning up the heat: nine discussion questions on overheating in domestic homes in the UK
Our world is getting warmer. On its current trajectory, average UK summers will be up to 4°C hotter than now. Heatwaves, such as the 2022 events that caused over 3,500 deaths and caused railways and hospitals to buckle, will become more frequent, more intense, and longer in duration. Major urban centres are particularly at risk, and cities the size of London will see temperatures up to 10°C higher than elsewhere.
Our homes are the foundation of our health and wellbeing, but the challenges posed by rising temperatures are placing more people at risk of what has been termed ‘hot house syndrome’. Our homes can either act as a shield from extreme heat, or exacerbate its negative impacts. In previous years, the housing and built environment sectors have undertaken a significant amount of work to protect people from other hazards in the home, especially the cold. However, research by the UN Environment Programme indicates that limiting global heating to 1.5°C is increasingly unlikely. We therefore need to begin a discussion about the best ways of mitigating the risk of overheating for UK households.
To further this objective, this paper poses nine questions: four for the housing and built environment sectors, and five for government and policy. Our contention is that these are questions that we need to be asking, and grappling with, with some urgency. The questions we pose are intended to be the starting point for debate and conversation, and we think that unless we start thinking through these questions now, the impact of overheating in homes could be unnecessarily severe.
Our discussion questions are listed below. In our accompanying paper, we discuss why we think they are important questions to pose and summarise some of the evidence that suggests that we need to be thinking about our answers to them now. We hope that in posing these questions, we can both raise awareness of some of the challenges a warming world presents and begin a conversation about how we mitigate some of the risks.
We would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further with interested readers, both from government and the housing and built environment sectors, as well as beyond.
- Do we know enough about how our homes will cope with warming scenarios of between 1.5°C and 3°C?
- How are we collecting data to understand overheating in our homes at the moment?
- How are we using PAS2035 to limit the risk of overheating through retrofit?
- Are we doing enough to prioritise green and blue spaces in development and placemaking initiatives, and what are the challenges of doing so?
- How do we get good national data on the prevalence of overheating?
- Is Approved Document O fit for the future?
- Can a home be decent if it is not sufficiently protected from overheating?
- Should our definition of fuel poverty be expanded to include homes that get too hot, as well as too cold?
- Do we need a national overheating strategy?
Authors: Noelene Marisa Yesudas from CaCHE and Matthew Scott from CIH.
