Extreme weather is now the new normal in the United Kingdom, with heat-related mortality to rise in coming years, according to two new research papers.
They concluded that extreme weather events are to be expected each year in UK and floods and storms brought the worst impacts in 2024.
The first report, the State of UK Climate in 2024 from the UK Met Office published in the International Journal of Climatology, showed how the region's climate has warmed steadily from 1980 onwards at a rate of approximately 0.25°C per decade. The last three years have been the top five warmest on record, with 2024 the fourth warmest year since 1884.
2024 had the UK's second warmest February, warmest May, fifth warmest December, fifth warmest winter and warmest spring on record.
The number and severity of snow events in the UK have declined since the 1960s, the report showed. The climate has become steadily wetter since the 1980s due to an increase in winter ‘half-year’ rainfall. "The most recent decade 2015–2024 has been 2 per cent wetter than 1991–2020 and 10 per cent wetter than 1961–1990," the study said.
Sea-level rise around the UK is accelerating and since 1901, the sea level around the country has risen by about 19.5 cm, with two-thirds rise happening in just over the last three decades.
Met Office climate scientist and lead author, Mike Kendon, said the report is about observations from weather stations across the UK, with records extending back to the 19th century. “And we can see that our climate is warming by around about a quarter of a degree per decade. But what's really interesting is as our climate warms, the thing that is most affected is the extremes. So we are seeing some really quite dramatic changes in our extremes, extremes of temperature and extremes of rainfall.”
The second study published in Plos Climate on July 10, 2025 found significant increases in heat-related mortality under high emissions scenarios. More than 30,000 people in England and Wales could lose their lives from heat-related causes by the 2070s. The study led by Rebecca Cole from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine calculated that heat mortality could rise more than fifty times in 50 years due to extreme heat in the worst-case scenario of 4.3°C of warming.
The highest burden was observed in the RCP8.5-SSP5 scenario (2050s: 10,317, 2060s: 19,478, 2070s: 34,027). This was due to combined high temperatures and population growth and ageing in the scenario.
Between 1981 and 2021, there were on average 634 annual heat-related deaths in England and Wales every year. Higher heat-related death rates in London and eastern England may result from increased urbanisation, which intensifies the urban heat island effect and leads to warmer climates in the southern regions of the country.
London also showed no change in adaptive capacity and thus may experience greater vulnerability within the population than other regions where adaptive capacity improved, the authors warned.
The higher levels of mortality seen in the East Midlands are likely due to population ageing, with very little increase in the younger age group and a relatively large increase in hot days, according to the report.
“While long-term averages are shifting, it is the extreme heat, intense rainfall and droughts that are having the most immediate and dramatic effects on people and nature,” Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, said.