\n
\n
![\"London](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Untitled-design-1-e1749297433790.png\" "\\"London")
<\/p>\nThe Mayor of London must prioritise cooling homes and planting more trees to help the city deal with future heatwaves, experts have warned.<\/p>\n
Londoners on Tuesday (August 12) faced both a \u201chigh\u201d pollution alert in the capital as well as an amber heat warning in place until Wednesday.<\/p>\n
City Hall said soaring temperatures \u2013 set to hit 34 degrees in some parts of the city \u2013 would create high ozone levels as the strong and prolonged heat and sunshine reacts with any present pollution.<\/p>\n
A London Assembly report last year confirmed high pollution days were now a \u201crare occurrence\u201d in the capital, but Tuesday\u2019s warning raised questions over the Mayor\u2019s strategy for protecting Londoners from increasing temperatures.<\/p>\n
City Hall is currently developing London\u2019s Heat Risk Delivery plan, which officials say will \u201cbetter prepare London for rising temperatures and extreme heat from climate change\u201d.<\/p>\n
Earlier today the Mayor was urged to focus on protecting homes from overheating and installing fountains, like other European cities, to help cool neighbourhoods.<\/p>\n
Sophie O\u2019Connell, Senior Policy Adviser at Green Alliance, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): \u201cLondoners will struggle with hotter temperatures than they are used to in the coming years, and the Met Office predicts that heatwaves could stick around for a month or more.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know that older people and those on lower incomes suffer the worst health effects from overheating homes.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo in his upcoming Heat Plan for London, the Mayor should prioritise preparing our homes for heat: making sure they\u2019re shaded, encourage air flow and limit the heat absorbed through the roof.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven many Londoners don\u2019t have a garden, it\u2019s good news we\u2019ll see more trees planted to provide shade, but we also need more cooling water features like fountains in poorer neighbourhoods.\u201d<\/p>\n
City Hall currently offers cool spaces and water refill stations around London to try and mitigate the effects of hot weather. The Mayor of London has also laid out plans to increase London\u2019s tree canopy cover by 10% by 2050 to further cool the city.<\/p>\n
Zo\u00eb Garbett, Green Party London Assembly Member, told the LDRS: \u201cWe\u2019re living through a climate crisis, and as temperatures continue to rise, too many Londoners are trapped in homes that turn dangerously hot.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis isn\u2019t just poor design, it\u2019s another layer of the housing emergency, driven by private developers operating without proper oversight. Alongside unaffordable homes, skyrocketing rents and mouldy homes, we\u2019re now facing a wave of new builds that can\u2019t cope with extreme heat.<\/p>\n
\u201cHomes with high temperatures put lives at risk, from sleepless nights to serious heart and breathing problems. And the impacts aren\u2019t felt equally, with social housing tenants being hit hardest, with two-thirds facing the greatest risk.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone deserves a home that\u2019s safe, affordable and built for the future, not ones that puts our health on the line.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opponents of the Mayor\u2019s environmental strategy, which has included the controversial ULEZ charge on polluting cars and aims to make London a Net Zero city by 2030, say he is focusing on the wrong measures to clean up and cool London\u2019s air.<\/p>\n
Thomas Turrell, the Environment Spokesman for the City Hall Conservatives, told the LDRS: \u201cLabour is going about it all wrong in the fight against pollution in Greater London.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Mayor has pulled the rug from under our electric vehicle market with his plans to force them to pay the congestion charge, plans to concrete over London\u2019s lungs with his anti-greenbelt campaign, and greenwashed his actions with publicity stunts like seeds given out at Tube stations. London deserves a Mayor who is serious about giving Londoners clean air.\u201d<\/p>\n
After hot weather in summer 2022 caused 387 excess deaths in London, a report from the independent London Climate Resilience Review said the city must \u201cbetter prepare\u201d for severe floods and heatwaves caused by climate change.<\/p>\n
Deputy Mayor Mete Coban said: \u201cThe first thing that we\u2019re doing is publishing a cool spaces map so we are signposting places to residents where they can go to cool off.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe second thing that we\u2019re doing is making sure we have much more water refill points \u2013 over 4,000 across the city \u2013 to make sure Londoners stay hydrated.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Through] our tree planting programme especially to create that shade, the Mayor has planted over 600,000 trees across the city since 2016.\u201d<\/p>\n
\ud83d\udce9
\n
\n <\/p>\n
Get the latest breaking news, roadworks, crime updates and local events straight to your inbox \u2013 totally free, every day.<\/p>\n
SIGN UP below<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Mayor of London must prioritise cooling homes and planting more trees to help the city deal with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4884,7833,2461,257,7834,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-339442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-harrow-online","12":"tag-heatwave","13":"tag-london","14":"tag-london-news","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115017886395428261","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}