London Climate Action Week

A comment piece by our Director of Sustainability – Wednesday 24 June 2026

Met Office red warning for extreme heat

Temperature – 34 degrees rural Hampshire

I had planned to spend the coming days attending workshops, talks, events and networking as part of London Climate Action Week. I was looking forward to this week having not been able to attend last years. These events provide an important opportunity to learn, share ideas and to contribute to the discussions about how we collectively respond to the climate crisis. I’ve had this week marked down in my calendar for months.

Instead, I now find myself unable to attend in-person due to my children’s school closures over the next two days due to a red weather warning issued by the Met Office, (only the second ever). The schools are closing at midday, due to extreme heat. We live in rural Hampshire, lucky enough to live in the South Downs National Park, surrounded by fields and nature. Temperatures here are certainly lower than in many towns and cities in the UK this week but they are still extremely high. As a result my children’s schools are taking the unusual step of closing early, requiring me and other parents to collect our children in the middle of the day.

Having to cancel my London Climate Action week event in-person commitments due to high temperature school closures, certainly does drive the point home and illustrates a much larger problem. The UK has historically been designed for a temperate climate, which we are rapidly leaving behind. Many school buildings struggle to remain safe during periods of extreme heat, because they were never expected to deal with temperatures of plus 30 or even closer to 40 degrees for any sustained period of time.

We know that heatwaves of this magnitude are going to become more frequent. Classrooms becoming uncomfortably, or even dangerously hot. Public buildings, transport systems, homes and workplaces, our entire built environment is affected. The majority of our built environment completely lacking the cooling measures which are standard in hotter countries.

‘Warming Strips’ first created 2018, created by Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading University) using data from UK Met Office.  

When I started my career in the late nineties, my first role was an Environmental Strategy Assistant in a Local Authority. In 1999 we hosted a climate change exhibition for the public. We set out the issues, the risks and the likely timeframes for what might happen to our climate, without major emission reductions. As it is turning out, those timeframes were optimistic.  We are seeing higher temperatures and more rapid consequences from climate change. Adaption is becoming more urgent and can no longer be treated as a future challenge. Retrofit is vital. We can’t expect to build heat resilient urban areas from scratch. There isn’t the time. We need rapid deployment of the technologies that are already available, such as Ground Source (GSHP) and Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) technology, solar, wind and battery storage and urban wilding at scale to bring nature’s cooling and shading effects into our towns and cities.

During London Climate Action week (though now homeworking whilst balancing childcare from early school closures) I have asked myself how our company - Sustainable Acoustics Ltd B Corp, can best contribute to solving the climate crisis? Thankfully there are many ways. Acoustics may not be the first thing many people think of when they think Net Zero. But we are very much part of the solution, acting as an important enabling industry for clean energy.

The government’s Clean Energy Industries Sector Plan states one of the government priorities to deliver a modern clean energy system is to “make and install a new generation of heat pumps, building on the skills of Britain’s boiler makers”. But the general public are, so far, showing signs of continued caution around mass take up of heat pump technology due, in part, to a perceived problem of noise. Unfortunately, deployment of ASHP has slowed (only 7% this year according to the BBC News today Heat pump growth stalls as government support cut, warns climate watchdog - BBC News). This is at the same moment the Institute of Acoustics, along with the Association of Noise Consultants and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Heath have come together to issue guidance on how to ease the red tape around noise control from ASHP Joint IOA CIEH Domestic ASHP Professional Advice Note (2026).pdf.  Our MD, Peter Rogers chaired this working group and it shows how acoustics is directly relevant to tackling the climate crisis. Mass deployment of ASHP on new homes and retrofitting our existing housing stock, will remain key to decarbonising our UK heating systems.

Another vital area where acoustics can support rapid decarbonisation is from increasing the pace of new renewables grid capacity development. Getting good acoustics design in place, is an important part of ensuring planning permission is secured for new solar farms, for on-shore wind and EV charging facilities and data centres that are served by renewable energy. To fully optimise a project’s potential, it is vital to bring acoustics into the design process early on. It helps secure sites faster and unlock challenging sites, which may otherwise cause noise issues to the communities they would be serving.

This enabling role for clean energy is clear from two recently published professional guidance notes issued by the acoustics industry, which our MD, Peter Rogers co-authored together with others. These, together with the Acoustics Ventilation and Overheating Design Guide are set out below.

·      Domestic Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP) Professional Advice Note (2026)  

·      Heat Pump Public Briefing Note

·      IOA Wind Turbine Noise Assessment Guidance, newly updated Assessment and Rating of Wind Turbine Noise

·      ANC Energy & Acoustics Guidance

·      ANC Acoustics Ventilation and Overheating (AVO) Design Guide

If you are interested in learning more on how acoustics can help deliver clean energy and how we can help deliver a more climate resilient built environment, we’d love to hear from you and get things right for the future. Please follow us on socials and connect with any of our team on LinkedIn.

Diana Rogers, Director of Sustainability.