UK Climate Rankings
These 20 local authority areas score highest across multiple climate hazards - flooding, air quality, heat and ground stability.
Each of four hazards is normalised to a 0-4 scale per the standard LocalRisk band system. The four scores for each council are then averaged and councils are ranked descending. Ties are broken by council size. The four inputs are: percentage of postcodes containing at least one property in EA/SEPA/NRW Higher flood-risk band; modelled annual-mean PM2.5 in micrograms per cubic metre from Defra UK-AIR; median projected days above 25°C in 2021-2040 from Met Office UKCP18 RCP8.5; and median BGS GeoClimate subsidence band across the council's postcodes.
No UK government agency publishes a single composite climate risk score at council level. Different agencies maintain different methodologies (the EA tracks flood, Defra tracks air, the Met Office tracks heat, the BGS tracks subsidence). LocalRisk combines them with equal weighting because there is no principled basis for weighting one hazard above another. A reader could reasonably argue flood deserves higher weight (because financial consequences are larger), or that PM2.5 deserves higher weight (because health consequences are larger). The composite is provided as a starting reference, not a verdict.
London has PM2.5 above the WHO guideline across all boroughs, high projected heat from the urban heat island plus southern geography, notable subsidence exposure in some boroughs sitting on London Clay, and material flood risk on the tidal Thames and in surface-water hotspots. Despite the Thames Barrier and significant defence infrastructure, the multi-hazard average pulls multiple London boroughs into the top 20. Outside London, coastal council areas with both flood and erosion exposure also feature.
The composite is a relative ranking, not an absolute score. Two councils with similar composite scores can have very different individual hazard profiles. For any specific decision, drill into the four underlying rankings or use the postcode lookup for the address you care about. Coastal erosion is excluded because it affects only a small subset of councils geographically and would dominate the ranking unfairly for those councils. Green space access is excluded because it is a quality-of-life metric rather than a risk metric.
Four input metrics are each normalised to a 0-4 scale: percentage of postcodes in EA Higher flood band, modelled annual-mean PM2.5 from Defra, median UKCP18 projected days above 25°C, and median BGS GeoClimate subsidence band. The four normalised scores are averaged with equal weighting. Councils are ranked descending; ties broken by council size.
No UK government agency publishes a single composite climate risk score at local-authority level. Each agency maintains its own hazard-specific methodology (EA for flood, Defra for air quality, Met Office for heat, BGS for subsidence). LocalRisk combines them at equal weighting as a starting reference; there is no principled basis for weighting one hazard above another, so the composite does not take a view on which matters more.
London faces material exposure across all four hazards: above-WHO PM2.5, high projected heat from the urban heat island plus its southern position, notable subsidence on London Clay, and tidal and surface-water flood risk. The Thames Barrier reduces tidal flood probability but doesn't eliminate it. When four moderately-elevated risks average together the result is a high composite score, which is why multiple London boroughs cluster at the top.
Coastal erosion (excluded because it affects only specific coastal councils and would unfairly skew the ranking), green space access (a quality-of-life metric, not a risk metric), groundwater flooding (not part of the EA's primary screening), and reservoir failure risk (separate Reservoir Inundation Maps dataset). For an address-specific picture covering all of these, check the LocalRisk postcode page.
Not directly on this page. The four underlying rankings (flood, air, heat, subsidence) are published separately on LocalRisk, so a reader who cares more about one hazard can prioritise that list. For users who need custom weighted scoring at scale, the underlying data sources (EA, Defra, Met Office, BGS) all publish their raw datasets under Open Government Licence.