The combination of periods of heavy, intense rainfall and the extended drought with periods of extreme heat are forcing politics and industry to face up to unpredicted challenges
Cambridge has another amber heat warning for extreme heat this week. This summer the red warning for extreme heat had significant impacts on how people worked – if at all. At a personal level it meant that I had to deliver an in-person presentation online because the distances that many of the audience members had to travel was too great given my afternoon slot for this all-day event. Hardly an extreme case – more of a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. But for those industries and sectors where people have to be out and about – operating public transport, anything to do with out-and-about tourism, agricultural work, logistics, emergency services and so on, it must have been very tough going.
Nature doesn’t care what the politicians and talking heads say, it will carry on doing its thing until/unless we change our ways and at scale
In the near future I can’t help but think there will be a huge Political reckoning with ministers/decision-makers and influential figures of previous governments and eras as to why they didn’t do enough given the continued and consistent warnings from scientists and others about the risks and scenarios we face with continued fossil fuel burning at scale.
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough’s Independent Commission on Climate Change – 2021
This was a significant report published under the authority of the first Combined Authority Mayor James Palmer, and persuaded a number of politicians of the seriousness of the threat.
“The chances of experiencing a hot summer like that in 2018 have doubled in recent decades and are now around 10-20% a year. A 2018 summer will be typical by 2050.”
Above – Agenda Document Pack – Combined Authority Board – 24/03/2021, p442 pdf of the agenda pack, and also p23 of the Independent Commission’s Interim Report
Five years ago seems like a very long time ago
And seven years ago was even longer. Back in April 2019 children and teenagers marched through Cambridge protesting over the lack of action on climate change.
Above – “We brought a few friends with us”
Half a year later and even more showed up that September
Above – Timelapse of the Cambridge Climate Strike 20 Sept 2019
The above two videos are from my Youtube Channel.
In the run up to the 2019 General Election, Boris Johnson got caught by another medical student (Dr Julia Simons) who followed him out, asking lots of awkward questions about the climate emergency that he ran away from. The video went viral.
Then the 2019 General Election happened followed by the devastation of the pandemic and the lockdowns that followed, and the corruption of Boris Johnson’s administration and the mess that followed.
And now we have found out the hard way what those very hot summers will be like.
It gets even worse for water supplies
The image below shows projected water demand as a percentage of available resource by the 2080s – with Cambridge and much of East Anglia consuming over 200% of what is available. This was before Michael Gove announced his plans for supersizing Cambridge in 2023.
Above – p24 of the CPICC Report
And if Wales is in drought, supplies from the west of the UK cannot be guaranteed despite the work being done to create a national grid for water supplies, as New Civil Engineer wrote about in 2025 here. Given the scale of the climate crisis, NCE and the profession of civil engineering:
- Should have a much, much higher public profile and
- Should be doing far, far more to teach both children and adults of the essentials of their professions (I had a look here). Because teenage me didn’t even know civil engineering as a profession existed until I got to university. (No, I haven’t forgiven Gillian Shepherd or John Major’s government – it’s one of my 1990s permanent chips on my shoulder!)
Overhauling industrial systems and supply chains
On water supplies alone, the retrofitting operation is massive. As I found out a year ago looking at one local case study on rainwater harvesting. Yet despite the droughts we’re not seeing any studies, let alone planning applications (or let alone actual building work) being done on rainwater harvesting on large industrial sites with single land owners. If anything that’s where we should start – with the easier wins that have less complicated paperwork with land owners. The alternative is we wait until it is even more than ‘too late’ for a Climate Emergency Powers Act to come in and enable the state to ‘get on with it’ Ernest-Bevin-WWII style (powers to conscript the labour and and acquire the assets and wealth of the country for the purposes of the prosecution of the War in WWII as Minister for Labour and National Service). One example near Cambridge is Impington Hall, which the authorities decided would make nice accommodation for the Royal Engineers, with the gardens being a splendid prisoner of war facility. So much damage was done to the building by the former that it got demolished a few years after the war had ended.
Which sort of serves as a cautionary note: Take preventative action now, or the things that you have and like may be taken by the authorities for the emergency responses and you may not get them back in quite the same state!
“So if we don’t reduce, retrofit, reuse, and recycle…?”
One industrial solution is to build more desalination plans such as the trio proposed by Anglian Water
…alongside six more from Water Resources South East here. Aside from costs and the huge energy demands, the problem of what to do with the huge volumes of waste product – the highly-concentrated brine/salt solution, is still something researchers have not solved. Also, the only working example we’ve got in Beckton, East London has been a litany of failure with just £500m Thames Water desalination plant has provided just seven days’ water over 15 years as reported by The Guardian in 2025. While researchers in the USA made progress in 2019 according to this article, it remains to be seen whether the minerals and salts present in the highly-concentrated waste can be extracted and reprocessed for other industrial uses in a sustainable way that does not leave such huge volumes of ecologically-harmful waste.
“Traditionally, seawater and industrial brines have been tapped mainly for common salt, but advances in membranes, crystallisation, and electrochemical processes now expand that portfolio. These techniques can separate and concentrate specific ions step by step, allowing several minerals to be harvested from the same stream.”
Above – Beyond Desalination: Brine Mining And Multi-Resource Water Hubs In MENA 28 June 2026
Are any UK university research units working on similar? If not, it might be an idea to start working on this.
It’s not just water – it’s the supply chains for new rail-based public transport too
I went to the monthly ADHD-Cambridge meetup last night and of the dozen-plus people there, one was a train driver and another was a researcher from Germany – the latter having something of a gold standard on light rail. One of the things they both noted was the lack of supply chains not just on components but also on trained and skilled workers in the right places at the right time. Which is why like many we wondered why HS2 didn’t start work in the north, connecting up the great northern cities rather than getting itself tangled up in knots with Conservative MPs and other opponents who did not want the new HS line going through their part of the countryside.
If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:
- Follow me on BSky or on LinkedIn (where I pick up a lot of town planning content)
- Like my Facebook page
- Consider a small donation to help fund my continued research and reporting on local democracy in and around Cambridge.
The Cambridge Town Owl 