At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites across the UK have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding over the past five years, a Carbon Brief investigation reveals.
Maternity centres, surgical theatres, a neonatal intensive-care unit and even entire hospital buildings have been disrupted by heavy rainfall or encroaching floodwaters.
Carbon Brief submitted freedom-of-information (FOI) requests to 162 NHS trusts, which show that while many flood-related shutdowns were brief, some lasted for weeks or months.
In total, 148 trusts responded to these requests with reports of 67 flood-related shutdowns, giving detailed data for 30 incidents that resulted in a total of 3,000 days of closures.
Reports of flooding at NHS sites have been on the rise, according to NHS England data.
This comes as the UK experiences wetter winters, with periods of extreme rainfall that are increasingly linked to human-caused climate change.
These floods can exacerbate existing problems in a healthcare system that is already struggling with insufficient funding, old hospital buildings and a backlog of maintenance work.
Indeed, while there have been efforts to make UK hospitals more resilient to extreme weather, one expert tells Carbon Brief that such measures are difficult to implement when these institutions are struggling to keep their “heads above water”.
Rising floods
Floods pose a threat to people’s health, but they also threaten the UK’s healthcare infrastructure. Water can enter hospitals, paralyse ambulance services and damage equipment, placing strain on an already stretched NHS.
NHS records show that the number of flood incidents “caused by external weather events” in facilities across England has doubled since 2021, reaching nearly 400 in 2024-25.
Equivalent data is not available for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, although there have been reports of floods disrupting services across the whole UK.
As global temperatures rise and the atmosphere holds more moisture, UK winters are getting wetter. Attribution studies show climate change has increased the severity of recent rainfall and flooding events – including Storm Eunice in 2022 and Storm Babet in 2023.
There is also a risk of increased flooding when heavy rain hits after periods of intense drought, of the kind seen in recent years.
Environment Agency modelling suggests that a rising share of medical facilities in England will be at risk of flooding due to climate change. It says the share of sites at risk will increase from a quarter in 2024 to a third by the middle of the century.
Despite this apparent threat facing the UK’s healthcare system, there is limited information about the extent to which these floods are already disrupting NHS services.
Closed services
To build a fuller picture of NHS-wide flooding, Carbon Brief sent FOI requests to 162 trusts and health boards – the organisations in charge of health services – across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
They were asked for details of wards, departments or services that had been temporarily or permanently closed due to weather-related flooding, such as river floods or heavy rainfall, between 2021-22 and the start of 2026.
In total, 148 of these bodies responded with details of 67 incidents in which weather-related floods have triggered closures. The map below shows where these incidents were located, from hospital wards in Scotland to an eye unit on the south coast of England.
The 67 flooding-related disruptions reported by NHS trusts and health boards is likely an underestimate. Many trusts told Carbon Brief they did not record such detailed information or that collating it would be too time-consuming.
Nevertheless, the results provide an insight into the kind of risks facing NHS services as weather gets more extreme.
Among the closures were 13 accident and emergency (A&E) departments, urgent treatment centres and minor injuries units. There were also 10 hospital wards, 10 surgical theatres, five maternity units and a neonatal intensive-care unit affected by flooding.
Many trusts did not provide information about how long each closure lasted. However, the 30 incidents where timespans were provided add up to the equivalent of more than 3,000 days – or eight years – of closures across NHS sites.
The infographic below provides a snapshot of some notable closures from the dataset.
The entire Buckland Hospital site in Dover closed for two days in 2025 amid “exceptional rainfall” and flash floods. People seeking radiology, maternity and urgent-care services were told not to visit over the weekend and various clinical services were delayed or cancelled.
The NHS declared a “major incident” in 2021 when flood waters “caused power outages impacting multiple areas” at Whipps Cross Hospital in north-east London – including its maternity service – for four days. Neighbouring hospitals also flooded.
Some closures lasted far longer. In Stroud General Hospital, a surgical theatre was closed for two weeks and an X-ray facility for around two months after storm water overflowed into the building in 2023.
Several NHS trusts stressed that the flooding incidents they reported were localised – often resulting from roof leaks exacerbated by heavy rain – and resulted in minimal disruption. Sometimes, as with a cardiology suite in Cannock Chase Hospital, the service was moved and the trust says patient care was not disrupted.
However, the responses also showed the breadth of damage such events can cause, including rainwater “pouring onto expensive equipment” and floods triggering the long-term relocation of services.
For example, Orchard Cottage, a site that provided care for adults with learning disabilities in Derbyshire, experienced major flooding during Storm Babet in 2023 and was permanently shut down as a result.
Adaptation needs
The UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, a group of UK health organisations, concluded in a report in 2025 that, with flood risks projected to grow, there is an “urgent need for adaptation measures” across the nation’s healthcare facilities.
Government advisors at the Climate Change Committee have highlighted the need for flood resilience in UK hospitals, including flood barriers, waterproofed electricals and built-in redundancy for critical areas, such as theatres, labs and IT equipment.
There have been various measures at both government and NHS level intended to improve the resilience of medical facilities to climate-related hazards.
The UK’s national adaptation programme sets out expectations for NHS England to “adapt NHS infrastructure to extreme weather events”. All trusts must have “green plans” in place, which require climate change to be factored into infrastructure decisions, for example, through the creation of drainage systems or green spaces.
Yet, as it stands, three-quarters of UK doctors say their workplaces are not prepared for the impact of extreme weather and nearly half of healthcare workers report that extreme weather has disrupted NHS services in the past five years.
Many hospitals have outdated infrastructure – often predating the founding of the NHS – which was not designed to cope with climate change. Prof Hugh Montgomery, chair of intensive-care medicine at University College London, tells Carbon Brief:
“The hospitals themselves weren’t built for this weather any more than anything else is really – and of course it’s going to get worse, in an exponential function.”
Many of the FOI responses provided to Carbon Brief identified specific building defects, such as roof leaks, which led to the flooding incidents during periods of heavy rainfall. There is a huge – and growing – backlog of maintenance work at NHS hospitals that was estimated in 2024-25 to need repairs costing £15.9bn.
Chris Naylor, a senior fellow at the King’s Fund, a thinktank focusing on health policy, tells Carbon Brief:
“Dealing with some of the backlog maintenance would probably help with climate adaptation as well, because of leaky roofs and all the rest of it. But we do also need to be thinking specifically about climate adaptation within the NHS and making sure there is funding for that.”
Montgomery points out that with trusts “mostly bankrupt” and most hospitals running a deficit, the question remains how to fund such interventions. “They’re struggling to keep their heads above water and they’re losing money,” he says.
Dr Mark Harber, a consultant nephrologist and special adviser on climate change at the Royal College of Physicians, tells Carbon Brief that hospitals at least need to make plans for extreme weather. This is particularly important for patients in need of time-dependent and life-saving treatments, such as kidney dialysis and chemotherapy.
Harber notes that hospitals, supply chains and transport could all be disrupted by floods:
“You have to have plans in place to deal with that, even if the NHS can’t deal with the flooding risk per se.”
Carbon Brief asked NHS England – which is responsible for the majority of the trusts that reported flooding disruption – for comment, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Methodology
The list of incidents reported by trusts can be viewed here.
Carbon Brief sent FOI requests to 120 English NHS trusts that have reported any incidents of flooding since 2021 in NHS England’s Estates Returns Information Collection (ERIC) dataset. This covers around 60% of all English NHS trusts.
Carbon Brief also filed FOI requests with all 42 of the health boards and trusts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which are equivalent to English NHS trusts.
All trusts and health boards were asked for details of wards, departments or services that have been temporarily or permanently closed due to weather-related flooding, such as river flooding or heavy rainfall.
This matches the wording used to describe a flooding event in the ERIC system, which requires the reporting of all flood events “caused by external weather events” that trigger a risk assessment by staff. Such external events are distinct from floods caused by other issues that are not related to the weather, such as burst pipes.
In total, 14 trusts did not respond and many more said they did not hold the data requested. Some trusts provided data, but on further questioning stated that the data they provided covered all flooding events and it was not possible to say which were related to weather conditions. These cases have not been included in the final dataset.
The post Revealed: Floods have forced at least 67 closures at NHS hospitals since 2021 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: Floods have forced at least 67 closures at NHS hospitals since 2021
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
The general public often underestimate support for climate action, while overestimating the real-world actions taken by other people to address the problem, according to new research.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, explores the differences between people’s support for climate change, their behaviour and their assumptions about other people’s behaviour.
It is based on multiple surveys of more than 5,000 people across Germany and the US.
The study expands on previous research on how the general public systematically underestimate the climate commitment of their peers.
The difference between actual and perceived support for climate action among the public is sometimes known as a “perception gap”.
The surveys tested how people’s perceptions of climate attitudes and behaviours relate to their own willingness to contribute and undertake “climate-friendly” actions.
One of the authors tells Carbon Brief that this perception gap is not due to “ignorance or bias”, but because “people are just not good at making good estimations”.
The research also reveals that people’s opinions and behaviours are more “nuanced than previously assumed” and suggests that simply “correcting misperceptions” does not automatically lead to greater climate action.
Measuring climate actions
The study notes that correcting the perception gap is often seen as a “cost-effective” way to promote public engagement and drive action to reduce the intensification and impacts of climate change.
Most studies that explore the perception gap have primarily focused on surveys that have asked people to report their willingness to support climate change.
In other words, researchers have relied upon people saying they would support efforts to tackle climate change, rather than measuring people’s real-world actions, such as financial donations, attending protests or changing their behaviour.
To fill this gap, the researchers behind the new study surveyed a total of more than 5,000 people in Germany and the US over 2024-25. Surveys were split across five different experiments, each focused on public perceptions of climate attitudes and how they relate to individuals’ actual behaviour:
| Experiment | What they did |
| Survey one | Participants were asked if they were willing to donate 1% of their household income to WWF – and then were given the chance to do so. Follow-up questions asked participants to predict how many of their peers said “yes” and how many actually donated to the charity. |
| Survey two | Participants read a constitutional complaint against the German government, led by Greenpeace, which demands for stricter climate policies. They were asked if they were willing to participate as a claimant and/or donate to the cause – and then were given the chance to do so. Follow-up questions asked participants to predict how many of their peers said “yes” and how many went on to support the complaint. |
| Survey three | Participants were requested to complete an online “work for environmental protection task” where the more “pages” they completed resulted in more donations to WWF. They then predicted how many pages their peers completed. Participants also rated their individual behaviours and support for eight climate policies and then estimated the same for other people. |
| Surveys four and five | Participants were split into three groups that were either informed that 4% of participants had donated 1% of their household income to WWF, that “68% were willing to contribute” or given no information. They then had to state whether they were willing to support WWF and then were given the opportunity to do so. |
The authors note that Germany and the US are two of the “top 10 CO2 emitters” and are places where climate action is “especially necessary”. However, they add that the two countries are not reflective of “diverse cultural contexts” and further research is needed across the world.
The perception gap
The researchers find that most of their participants supported climate action, but much fewer actually performed verifiable behaviours.
For example, survey one finds that 37% of participants said they were willing to donate to WWF, yet just 4% did when given the opportunity.
Participants generally overestimated the climate actions of their peers, predicting that 23% of other people donated. Willingness, on the other hand, was slightly underestimated with respondents averaging around 34%.
The results from survey three suggest that this perception gap is likely due to general cognitive processes within the human brain that make accurate estimations about large groups difficult, say the authors.
The chart below shows the actual percentage of people who supported different environmental policies and performed climate-friendly behaviours (blue dots) compared to average predictions from the surveys (red dots).
They reveal a “consistent pattern” where “small proportions were overestimated and large ones were underestimated”, the authors say, driving predictions towards the middle. This phenomenon is known as “regression to the mean”.
In other words, where public support for a policy was high, participants in the survey estimated it was lower than it was. When the support was lower, estimates would be higher.
The study finds that individual and environmental factors played a role in shaping people’s perceptions of their peers’ climate actions, which were distinct from general misestimations.
For example, people who were already involved in climate action, had more frequent climate discussions and consumed more climate-focused news and media predicted a higher proportion of climate support “across the board”.
The results from the fourth and fifth surveys show that knowing the context of other people’s beliefs and behaviour in surveys can impact the attitudes of participants.
Participants that were told that 68% of people were willing to donate 1% of their household income to the WWF were more willing to donate.
In contrast, participants that were told that 4% of people actually donated did not report more willingness to “discuss climate change, sign petitions or donate” than the control group.
However, there was no obvious impact on actual donations for any of the three groups, the study notes.
Lead study author Dr Kevin Tiede, scientific managing director of the Institute for Planetary Health Behaviour at the University of Erfurt, tells Carbon Brief that the findings suggest that “just telling people how many people support climate action is likely not enough to really change something”.
However, Tiede adds that “direct comparability” between people saying they would donate and actually donating is “limited” and that giving people more time to answer and autonomy over where to donate might result in more people taking action.
‘Pluralistic ignorance’
Tiede explains that the study findings demonstrate the existence of “pluralistic ignorance”, where a person believes their own views differ from the majority.
For climate change, this means that the “vast majority of people around the world support climate action, but people considerably underestimate the extent of this support”, the study says.
However, the surveys reveal that pluralistic ignorance “in the climate domain” is more nuanced than previously thought, say the authors.
Prof Madalina Vascleanu, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that encouraging climate action is complex.
It may take multiple and repeated “attempts” at effective communication, or for people to directly “experience” the “norm” that climate change is widely supported, she says, rather than simply being told.
“Observable” behaviours, such as “identity signalling” – which could involve anything from protesting to vegetarianism – might have more of an impact on encouraging climate action among peers than “private behaviours like donations”, she adds.
The study is a “great addition to the literature”, Vascleanu says, because “correcting” the perception gap did not have an effect on climate-friendly behaviour, as “scholars had previously assumed”. She adds that it has “sparked several new hypotheses” that her “lab is now working on”.
Prof Mauro Bertolotti, associate professor of social psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, explains that the “attitude-behaviour gap” revealed by the research is a “rather common finding”.
However, he is “sceptical” of the “simplified and abstract” measures, warning that experiment environments often come with “assumptions and expectations” that are different from real life.
As a result, they might not “replicate” the process people go through when choosing to “make a donation to an environmental cause”, he says.
‘Targeted’ communication strategies
The researchers argue that it is more effective to focus on “targeted” communication strategies – encouraging climate-friendly behaviours that aim to reach the majority who already support climate action, rather than trying to convert climate sceptics.
They call for attention to be paid to the attitude-behaviour gap between people saying they support efforts to tackle climate change and following up with real-world climate actions.
The study suggests strategies for decision-makers to reduce the attitude-behaviour gap, such as “facilitating climate-friendly behaviour” with “convenience and subsidies”. They also recommend ensuring environmental policy prioritises fairness to gain visible and widespread public support.
They add that the public would benefit from understanding the “effectiveness and co-benefits” of climate action.
Tiede, K.E. et al. (2026) People systematically under- and overestimate public engagement in climate action, Nature Climate Change, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02668-z
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The post Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action
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