It’s official. It was the UK’s hottest summer on record, and now – in October – we are experiencing warmer than average temperatures yet again. 

More frequent extreme heat has crept into the lives of Britons, and we are beginning to see the realities of climate change quite literally in our back gardens. 

We’ve seen before our eyes our natural habitats become increasingly unliveable, with the impact on our already-stressed wildlife severe. 

Fractured

According to Natural England, hedgehogs and birds have been unable to dig for worms in the dry soil; water sources for all kinds of creatures have dried up; peatlands have become parched, and wildfires have destroyed acres of land important for conservation.   

But while the effects of climate change have been particularly acute in the UK this summer, in many parts of the world, shifting weather patterns have been pummelling nature and the people who rely on it for years. 

Over the course of this year, Fauna & Flora and partners have been working with affected communities in three African countries to document what climate impacts look like in their reality - and the results are stark. 

In Kenya, extreme heat and drought have been driving both people and nature to the brink of collapse in recent years. 

Income sources – particularly agriculture - have been wiped out, communities have been fractured, rivers have dried up, and wildlife, including elephants, zebras, and wildebeests, are literally dropping dead in the savannah. 

Vulnerabilities

In Tanzania’s Pemba Island region, where communities rely heavily on marine resources for survival, they’ve seen rising sea levels and sea temperatures disrupt marine life and fishing, while saltwater intrusion damages agriculture. 

Island communities in Cabo Verde have also been increasingly battered by extreme weather patterns; there are years with severe and prolonged droughts, but when rain does occur, it often results in catastrophic events. 

As recently as August, a tropical storm in São Vicente and Santo Antão brought more than a year’s worth of rain in less than five hours; wiping out infrastructure and costing lives, both human and wildlife.  

Our world’s natural ecosystems are struggling to cope, and the consequences for communities are deadly. But while nature is increasingly stressed by human-induced climate change, it can also be one of our greatest allies in building resilience. 

In Kenya, extreme heat and drought have been driving both people and nature to the brink of collapse. 

The same communities in Kenya are restoring degraded local landscapes through native tree planting and removal of invasive species, because when these habitats are thriving they can better reduce vulnerabilities to climate change – supporting water sources, good soil and pasture, controlling erosion, and providing natural defences against extreme weather. 

Absorbing

In Cabo Verde, communities are fighting back by securing better protection for their marine areas – enabling marine ecosystems to recover, and keeping fish populations afloat, despite worsening heat stress. 

Meanwhile, Tanzanian communities are restoring mangrove forests to combat flooding and coastal erosion – a cost effective and natural defence mechanism with many co-benefits for biodiversity and local livelihoods. 

There is an incredible array of ecosystem-based approaches to climate adaptation being deployed by just this small segment of African communities, and these methods are not only helping people cling onto a sense of normality, they are benefitting species and habitats too. 

When you plant a mangrove tree you don’t just install a flood defence. You provide food and shelter for myriad fish, shrimps and oysters. You provide a home for birds, reptiles and monkeys. 

You regulate the water, supporting even more species. You create a carbon sink, absorbing and storing carbon from the atmosphere. 

Ecosystems

And when mangrove forests are robust, the individual trees stand stronger too - better able to withstand the storms, or the temperature increases, driven by climate change. Indeed, when you protect and restore nature, it becomes more resilient to climate change. And this helps us to be more resilient too. 

In the UK, we can take lessons from these communities and apply them here: prioritising ecosystem-based and locally-led approaches to climate adaptation. 

This could look like protecting and restoring woodlands to reduce flood risk and provide natural cooling for people and wildlife. Or it could be establishing saltmarsh habitats to provide coastal protection from sea-level rise and storm surges.

Greening urban areas also provides a wide range of benefits not only for nature, but for residents and the local economy – for example, in Lisbon, for every $1 invested in tree management, residents receive $4.5 in benefits thanks to the cleaner air, energy savings and stormwater runoff reduction.

There are plenty of proven nature-based solutions that cost little to introduce, and will not only save money in the long run – they will save our infrastructure, our natural ecosystems, our wellbeing. They will save our lives. 

Commitments

But the UK is clearly falling behind. The most recent Climate Change Committee report on adaptation and resilience shows that, despite “ambitious aims” for nature-based solutions, the UK government has made little to no progress in building the climate resilience of nature in the last two years, and our environment is generally declining. 

As highlighted in the report – we cannot effectively adapt to climate change if the ecosystems we rely upon are in such a dilapidated condition. This applies to the UK. It applies to Europe. It applies to Africa and everywhere in the world.  

This Autumn the UK government has a critical opportunity to turn things around. Top level leadership showing up at the UN climate negotiations, COP30, in Brazil is the first step. 

But what we really need to see is a greater commitment to real action. This means delivering on promises outlined in the government’s own National Adaptation Programme, while delivering on its international finance commitments on climate and nature, and stepping up with a new pledge in line with the new finance goal agreed at COP29 in Baku. 

Beautiful

At COP30, we hope nations will also finalise the implementation framework of the Global Goal on Adaptation, including establishing indicators to guide and measure adaptation progress, and will agree a new adaptation finance goal underpinned by a concrete plan on how to scale finance for building climate resilience. 

This is an important moment to put nature front and centre of climate adaptation solutions globally, and, in turn, to bring additional benefits for the world’s most vulnerable wildlife and communities, as well as for our own back gardens. 

The next ten years are crucial, not only for reducing emissions, but for putting the necessary changes in place to ensure the next generation are still able to enjoy the UK’s beautiful wildlife and landscapes. 

Climate change is no longer out of sight, out of mind – so why wouldn’t we do what we can right now?

This Author

Annamaria Lehoczky is the senior technical specialist on climate change at Fauna & Flora.