Helena Horton

They're built to retain heat because we're used to being relatively cold, mild country.

And we don't have air conditioning.

So that means in old people's homes, in schools, in overcrowded flats in London and across the country, whether you have people on lower incomes, they're the ones who are most at risk of heat stress.

And they're often people who are already vulnerable and already have health conditions.

So it's very concerning.

And our country just isn't prepared for this level of heat.

Every piece of our infrastructure, all of our homes, they're not prepared for it.

Because why would you prepare for something that never happened really before or only happened occasionally?

But now it's happening all the time.

And for wildlife, of course, too, we're seeing ponds drying up.

If people have a garden or a front garden and they could put a dish of water out, a shallow dish of water out for local wildlife, that probably would be very helpful.

Yes.

Our rail tracks, the stress test up to 27 degrees Celsius, and that was reasonable because that was pretty much the average hot summer temperature that we got.

And that means that they're not reinforced in the same way that rail tracks are in other countries that are hotter, because if you reinforce them too much, you end up having issues when it gets cold below freezing.

um and so basically we're in a happy medium at the moment because we have them um so they don't buckle under the heat well the heat that we used to get and they also don't shatter in winter but now we get we might have to look at how we can make them more resilient the tarmac on the roads also melts because other countries they mix in polymers and plastics into their tarmac to reinforce it to make sure it doesn't melt in the same way it does here we haven't done that because we haven't had to so why would we spend money doing it when

It didn't happen before.

It was reasonable at the time, but now it's looking less reasonable.

Yes.

I wouldn't say that air conditioning itself is bad for the environment always.

So the government is trying to get us to invest in heat pumps for our homes.