Rachel Kyte, the UK’s Special Representative for Climate, warns why everyone must defy the skeptics to plan and prepare for even more extreme conditions. This includes for their health and everything about how they live. She was speaking to Nick Robinson on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 23 December 2025.
RACHEL KYTE
We know that this isn’t a blip. This is actually the new normal. This is our future encapsulated in data. And so now the question is, how are we going to prepare ourselves and build our own resilience to this?
PRESENTER
Resilience is an interesting starting point. In other words, do you think we as citizens, but also policymakers have to start to adapt to the inevitability of higher temperatures?
RACHEL KYTE
Yes, and I think that we’re already seeing that as you’ve already heard, but we can now with this level of warming and the fact that we haven’t yet quite got the decrease in warming under control.
Right, we are on a much better path than we were 10 years ago, but we’re still not where we need to be. But this is going to be something that we’re living with because the pollution we put in for the last 20 to 30 years is now what is driving this warmth. And so not curbing emissions well enough means that we’re going to continue to see these kinds of impacts.
And so, yes, we have to be resilient as human beings. Our infrastructure has to be resilient and we have to help nature protect us by investing in it because it provides us with resilience too.
PRESENTER
Resilience against what? What should we prepare for?
Everything Is At Risk
RACHEL KYTE
Well, I think the Climate Change Committee blocked it out for us really in their recent report. They talked about flooding and coastal risk.
They talked about heat and health. They talked about new buildings, how to retrofit what we’ve already got and how we should be building things going forward. They talked about water supply and drought, infrastructure resilience more broadly. They talked about pressures on agriculture and food. And they talked about the fact that this needs joined up government and planning.
PRESENTER
It means money too, and one of the things that seems to me has set back the arguments on climate change is the feeling that in inverted commas, we just can’t afford it.
Don’t Wait: Invest Now
RACHEL KYTE
Yeah, and this has plagued, I think, investment in climate action for 20 to 25 years now. And the truth of the matter is if we don’t invest in our adaptation now, it’s going to cost us way more.
And these are numbers that come from the OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility}, they come from the Climate Change Committee, they come from independent reports, and so it’s estimated that the kinds of impacts that we will see if we don’t adapt are going to cost us six percentage points of our growth over the next 25 years.
Whereas if we invest in some of the things that we need to do now, that’s going to be considerably less.
Politics Moving Against What is Needed
PRESENTER
What do you make of the politics of this because that’s your specialty? There is a sense, isn’t there, that the politics of climate change has gone into a dramatic reverse in which there are governments all over the world, not least where you are in the United States and here in the UK, under huge pressure to stop spending on trying to deal with climate change because there are politicians, not just on the right but elsewhere, saying this is a waste of money, other countries are polluting the planet, we need to just focus on getting our costs down.
RACHEL KYTE
I mean, I could break it down. Other countries are doing everything that they can or are on track with the exception of one country, right? So I don’t think you can sort of point and talk to, talk about other countries not doing everything they need to do. This is a community and international community collective effort.
The second, I think that within the UK where I’m living, the, you know, on the right, we obviously have detractors and an attempt to make a culture war out of what is what everybody can see with their own eyes, the reality of our existence today and our existence for years to come.
So What Is Needed?
I think what people want is practical discussions about how are we going to keep our air clean? How are we going to have affordable electricity? How are we going to invest in our flood defences? And how are we going to protect ourselves from extreme heat? I mean, at the end of the day, the people’s revulsion of politics is because it’s not talking about the things that they see and feel with their own eyes and hands and bodies.
Yeah, is this transition difficult? Yes. Does it require big decisions which take 10, 20 years to be realised? Yes. Does that require leadership? Yes. Is it something that we can look away from? No.
PRESENTER
In the end though, do we have to be honest with citizens and say you can’t have that and cheaper bills?
RACHEL KYTE
I think you’re honest with citizens about we have to make choices, and those choices are reflected in the ballot box.