Executive summary
Introduction and who this work is aimed at
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Executive Summary >> Part One >> Part Two >> Part Three >> Part Four >> Glossary >> References
Part Two looks at physical risks, which relate closely to the location and environmental context for each institution and its estate.
Awareness of the gravity of environmental risks related to climate and nature has developed substantially over recent years. The World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risk Report[1] now regularly shows environmental risks amongst the most serious at the global level, particularly over longer time horizons as disruption of the climate and environment increases.
Two overarching categories have formed the focus of global initiatives around facing environmental risks:
The global destruction of nature is a critical contributor to climate change, which in turn is further damaging the natural world. While our analysis focuses on the climate variables of environmental risks, our relationship with nature is an inherent dimension of how these risks are compounding and offers solutions for how they might be mitigated[4].
Our work here focuses on physical risks[5], which relate most closely to the physical location (“exposure”) of assets and are set to grow as climate change and nature loss disrupt environmental systems. Transition risks and systemic risks, which form important categories in the climate and nature risk literature, have less direct linkages to physical location and are not our focus here but are discussed in detail in the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) literature. These include the risks to institutions through disruption to their supply chains, critical infrastructure and so on.
The fundamental concepts around physical climate risks and an organisation’s capability to adapt to them are set out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s body of work on risk, adaptation and vulnerability. Risks manifest in organisations’ exposure to hazards, which entails an expectation of increased loss and damage – and associated costs – in the future as hazards become more severe. Impacts, and the associated costs, can be further exacerbated by the institutions’ vulnerabilities.
Climate risk: key concepts
Extracted from IPCC AR5 Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
The UK Government oversees ongoing programmes of work around climate risk and adaptation. The UK Climate Change Risk Assessments[6] and the UK National Adaptation Programme[7] are useful for organisations to situate themselves in the national context, and provide guidance around good approaches for responding to climate risks.
Higher education sector organisations have also produced various resources to help institutions understand the climate and environmental risks, including EAUC’s Climate Risk Register Guide and Tool[8]. Further information on sector resources is included in the References and further reading section.
It now appears unlikely that global climate action will successfully limit global temperature rise to within 1.5C. The IPCC sets out a range of scenarios for potential future temperature rise[9]. Which scenarios come to pass will depend on global climate mitigation efforts.
Global temperature rises will affect weather patterns such as rainfall, as well as temperature. Changes to weather will vary at regional and local levels due to the complexity of the climate system and its interaction with other natural systems.
The UK Met Office has modelled possible future climate conditions across the UK under different climate scenarios. We have overlaid these datasets on our map of university estates. In line with UK Government advice, we focus on scenarios of 2C and 4C global temperature rise – roughly corresponding to the IPCC’s Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP)4.5 and RCP8.5 respectively and both plausible scenarios for the second half of this century.
Our sector map provides data on observed and potential future patterns for rainfall and temperature across the UK, drawing from the relevant public data sources. The impacts of changing climate and weather patterns will vary by locality, conditioned by a range of factors. We explore these, and their implications for the risk environment for institutions and their estates, in the following section.
Institutions can use these geospatial datasets as part of an environment scan around potential future conditions.
Sector map datasets: temperature and rainfall
The shorthand description of future climate conditions for much of the UK is generally hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters.
As average general weather patterns change, the frequency and intensity of dangerous weather events such as extremely high temperatures (with risk to human health, fire etc) or torrential rain (with increased flood risk) grow accordingly. Such events may be particularly dangerous if their impacts are compounded by specific local conditions.
Our sector map draws together public datasets supplemented by our own analysis to provide insights around an environment of increased hazards for institutions’ locations. Two areas have data which is sufficiently granular to combine with our sector estate boundaries for more detailed analysis of risks to UK universities: flood risk and heat islands.
For institutions that have not yet begun to bring climate and nature risks into their risk management systems, this information can inform detailed bottom-up risk and vulnerability assessments for their estates.
An important point to note around these datasets is that they show observed patterns under current conditions. We do not have detailed modelling for what these patterns may be like in the future (for example the 2C and 4C global temperature rise scenarios mentioned above). But future climate conditions of hotter, drier summers and wetter winters will certainly exacerbate existing exposure to these hazards and increase the risk of loss and damage.
Sector map datasets: flood and heat island risk
We calculated the areas and percentages of each institution’s estate that can be considered at medium or high flood and heat risk, and where this overlaps with built areas. These are set out below for each institution in our dataset.
Again, this data reflects current conditions: data for analysis of different temperature rise scenarios is not available, however it can be expected that with increased seasonal extremes of wet and hot weather, a greater proportion of institutions’ land would be in flood and heat island risk areas.
At the sector level, 197.5 ha of university lands (or 3.15% of the HE estate) is currently at high or medium risk of flooding[11]; and 4,102.1 ha is at high or medium risk of heat stress[12].
The instances where floods or extreme heat risk incurring the greatest costs for institutions is where their built estate is in high-risk areas. The higher the proportion of an estate’s area is built up, the higher the risk of any hazard-prone areas coinciding with built areas and greater risk of damage and costs to key infrastructure (as well as disruption to critical business and danger to human health and safety) if a hazard takes place.
We should note that the two risk datasets are not totally independent variables from built land cover. Built areas can exacerbate both flood risk by reducing the scope for water absorption; and also frequently exacerbate heat islands (where we see a clear correlation in the geospatial data).
Across the sector, 92.1 ha of land with high or medium flood risk is built environment; and 2,898.6 ha of high or medium heat risk is built. There is a total area of around 44 ha where built environment is situated with both high/medium flood risk and heat risk.
The aim of our analysis is to provide pointers to institutions – particularly those with high percentages of built and high-risk areas – to undertake more detailed, site-specific risk and vulnerability assessments.
Where institutions currently have large overall areas or high percentages of their estate with notable heat islands (which as noted correlate to a large degree with built areas), this tendency can be expected to increase as temperatures warm, particularly on the hottest days.
Institutions would benefit from undertaking onsite vulnerabilities assessments around temperature on their estate, if this has not already been done. Following UK Government guidance, we recommend using scenarios of 2C and 4C global temperature rise.
Better understanding of this picture for the specifics of university sites will also allow for options assessment around adaptation measures (including land-based approaches such as increased areas of non-built space or green infrastructure) to mitigate heat island effects; or if it is unavoidable, manage conditions of high heat through more cooling (which brings increased energy use).
The same stands for institutions that have a large built area in flood-prone zones. Understanding the current risk (which is likely to be on the radar already for many of these institutions) and how it might develop with the changing climate opens into exploring options for response.
While nature-based solutions such as extending wetlands or porous ground surfaces can potentially mitigate flood risks in some areas, institutions may wish to consider relocating valuable equipment, high-use areas or strategic activities if situated at the most risky sites.
An increase in extreme weather events due to climate change over the coming decades is expected to cause substantial loss and damage across the world, including in the UK.
While it is difficult to estimate the potential costs with a high degree of certainty, we do have some points of reference.
The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment models the potential costs of floods under 2C and 4C temperature rise scenarios. By its estimates, the likely costs of flooding from rivers, surface water and coastal flooding at a national level run into billions of pounds annually, even in the milder 2C scenario. These would be even greater with 4C global temperature rise.
Work by the Grantham Institute estimates[13] potential annual damages due to flooding at around 0.13% of UK GDP by 2100 under current global mitigation policies, and drought-related damages at 0.25% of GDP.
If we were to extrapolate that percentage to HE sector income as a rough guide, damages could easily run into hundreds of millions of pounds annually across the sector. As a reference point, 0.38% of the sector’s total 2022/23 income of £43.9 billion equates to a potential £166.8 million of losses annually.
While losses would likely be spread across multiple institutions (although of course extreme weather events are unpredictable), financial impacts of this order are material – particularly for those institutions which are most exposed.
For universities, climate impacts might manifest not only in damage to buildings and other infrastructure, but also loss of valuable equipment and disruption to critical business – both of which would carry further costs for institutions – and impacts on the health, wellbeing and safety of their staff and students. Insurance costs will also rise as damaging extreme weather events become more frequent, and certain assets may become uninsurable.
At the time of writing (in 2025), as institutions navigate acute financial challenges and seek to adapt to a changed economic and policy environment, one of the critical characteristics that will need to define the sector’s future model is resilience; and the substantial costs which may result from physical climate risks speak to a need for adaptation to climate change.
Adaptation takes a number of forms, which cut across the whole of organisations and how they work. But measures generally focus around three goals:
- reducing exposure to hazards (for example, moving location – although in many cases is this not a feasible option)
- reducing vulnerabilities (for example, improving the resilience of infrastructure)
- increasing the organisations’ adaptive capacity (for example, early warning systems for hazards)[14].
Adaptation will carry upfront costs for institutions. While this is the case, modelling indicates that the projected costs of loss and damage without adaptation will be substantially greater[15], and most adaptation measures have a high benefit to cost ratio if they are undertaken in good time. This could be expressed succinctly as: “spend now to save later”.
A simple and useful way to approach identifying adaptation measures is seeking to identify “no-regret options”, “win-win options”, and “low-regret options”[16], which provide a good initial rule of thumb for identifying measures with decent benefit to cost profiles before detailed modelling.
Potential adaptation measures need to be evaluated with reference to an organisation’s specific exposures and vulnerabilities, and in the context of its available resource envelope and other constraints.
Cost and benefit modelling for institutions, specific to their site, will inform the business case for adaptation.
Again, sector-specific resources are also available to support institutions with thinking about adaptation, including the recent Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Guide published by Association of University Directors of Estates (AUDE)[17]. Various institutions have also published adaptation plans which are available online, including the Universities of Surrey, Edinburgh, Strathclyde, Glasgow, Manchester, Leicester and Cranfield University.
There may also be scope for thinking about how the higher education sector might collaborate to pool resources for adaptation, risk management or hazard response; or potentially to offer frontloaded support for the most vulnerable institutions.
From a government perspective, funding to support universities with climate adaptation (corresponding to funding schemes such as Salix for decarbonisation and climate mitigation) may avoid substantially higher costs of loss and damage further down the line.
In the big picture, reducing the risks around increased exposure to physical hazards also underlines the necessity for every organisation to reduce its own impacts on climate change and nature loss, which are the ultimate drivers of the deteriorating risk environment.
Notes and references
[1] https://www.weforum.org/publications/series/global-risks-report/.
[2] See Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). 2017. Recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.
[3] See Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). 2023. Recommendations of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures.
[4] World Economic Forum. 2021. Nature and net zero.
[5] See for example IPCC. 2014. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5 Climate Change 2014): Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.
[6] The most recent assessment was published in 2022, the next is due in 2027.
[7] See https://www.ukclimaterisk.org/national-adaptation-programmes/.
[8] See https://www.eauc.org.uk/climate_risk_register.
[9] See for example IPCC AR5 Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report.
[10] This dataset only covers Great Britain, therefore our sector-level calculations around the proportion of land exposed to flood risk do not include Northern Ireland.
[11] According to DEFRA classifications.
[12] Calculated as the differential between land surface temperature within polygons and a 2km buffer outside the polygon. Medium heat stress is defined as 1.5C. High heat stress equates to areas 3.0C warmer than the surrounding buffer average temperature.
[13] Rising, J. et al. 2022 What will climate change cost the UK? A study of climate risks, impacts and mitigation for the net-zero transition. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
[14] See Hebcon and EAUC. 2019. Using an existing organisational resilience framework to develop a Climate Change Adaptation Plan.
[15] See Climate Change Committee. 2021. Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk.
[16] This model is adopted by the UK Climate Change Committee, as well as the European Union’s EU Climate-ADAPT programme. See IPCC. 2014. AR5 Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.
[17] AUDE. 2025. Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Guide.
