Mapping the Impact of Extreme Weather and Adaptation Strategies in Adult Social Care

• Social care

What is the Context? 

Climate change is leading to more frequent and severe extreme weather events such as heatwaves, cold spells, and flooding. These events pose serious health risks for everyone, but particularly for people who rely on adult social care services. Older people, individuals with disabilities, and those with long-term health conditions are especially vulnerable to changes in temperature and disruption to services. For example, during the 2022 heatwave, when England recorded its highest ever temperature of 40.3°C, around 3,000 excess deaths were linked to the extreme heat with significant increase in mortality among older people.

In addition to documented impact of extreme weather events on excess mortality, existing evidence shows that hospitalisation admission rates increase significantly for older people. However, far less is known about the impact of such events on adult social care services, such as care homes, home care agencies, and unpaid carers. Yet social care plays a vital role in protecting people’s health and wellbeing. Understanding these impacts is therefore critical to ensuring safe, resilient, and equitable care in the face of climate change.

• What did we want to know?

  This project examines how extreme weather affects adult social care services, with a particular focus on interventions that help to adapt to and mitigate these impacts. It asks:

  • What is known about the impact of heatwaves, cold spells, and floods on adult social care?
  • How do these impacts differ across care settings (e.g. care homes, home care), types of providers (e.g. paid and unpaid carers), and places (e.g. rural or coastal areas)?
  • What interventions or policies already exist to help social care services and users prepare for, respond to, or recover from extreme weather events?
  • How effective and feasible are these interventions for the UK context?

• What did we do?

  The study takes place over two years (June 2025- June 2027); and involve several stages:

  Reviewing existing evidence: We will review international research and policy documents to understand what is already known about the impact of extreme weather on adult social care (or long-term care) services, and what interventions have been tried.

  Mapping interventions: we will develop a framework that maps existing interventions (from both social care and healthcare) to extreme weather events, that is specific to the different components of the adult social care system. The latter will include elements such as the types of care services, regulations and the workforce while ensuring the inclusion of the active roles of service users and their informal carers. This framework will be discussed and refined with input from policymakers, regulators, care organisations, and service users.

  Interviews and focus groups: we will speak to care providers, care workers, service users, and informal carers across different settings and regions of the UK to explore how relevant, practical, and effective the identified interventions are in practice.

• What were the key findings?

  TBC once project finished