It has rained every single day in the United Kingdom since January 2026.
I watch from my window as water runs down the glass, the same grey curtain that has hung over this island for weeks without pause. The garden is a bog, the drive puddled. The street has a semi-permanent stream running down one side. My neighbour tells me her garage flooded again last night. Rain crept in under the door that was meant to protect.
This isn’t weather anymore. This is something else.
The forecasters stopped using words like “unusual” or “unprecedented” sometime around mid-January. Now they just show us the maps – great swathes of red and orange creeping across the country like an infection. Everyone I know has a story – a cancelled train, a closed road, a water-soaked garden. We’ve started speaking in a new vocabulary – surface water flooding, climate attribution, managed retreat. These are the words of a country now learning to live with the permanence of something that wasn’t supposed to happen in our lifetime.
The United Kingdom is experiencing a fundamental shift in its weather patterns, with record-breaking rainfall becoming disturbingly common. This isn’t natural variation – it’s a climate emergency driven by human activity, and it’s disrupting lives, destroying homes, and threatening the very foundations of how and where we live.
The Evidence: When Records Become Meaningless
Between October 2022 and March 2024, England experienced its wettest 18-month period since records began over 250 years ago. Southern England received approximately 150% of average rainfall during this period. The harvest that followed was the second worst since modern records began in 1983. Arable land remained underwater for months. Crops rotted in saturated soil.
The Met Office confirms that heavy rainfall is becoming more frequent and more extreme in the UK. In today’s climate, with 1.2°C of global warming, similarly intense storm rainfall is expected to occur about once every five years, compared to once every 50 years in a pre-industrial climate. But here’s what keeps the climate scientists awake at night – if global warming reaches 2°C, these devastating periods of rainfall will become even more common.
The implications are severe and they’re already here. Currently, 6.3 million properties in England are at risk of flooding from rivers, the sea, and surface water. This could rise to around 8 million properties – that’s 25% of all properties – in the next 25 years. The Committee on Climate Change warns that up to a further 45,000 properties could be at risk of coastal erosion during the same period. This is the trajectory we’re on.
Building on the Flood Plain: The Madness of Overdevelopment
Even as we acknowledge the climate crisis, and as flood warnings become routine, we’re making it worse through sheer stupidity. The UK is overdeveloping its greenbelt and countryside at a suicidal pace, paving over the very land that could help absorb floodwater, to build homes in places that will themselves be submerged within a generation.
Over the past decade, more than 120,000 new homes in England and Wales have been built in flood-prone areas. I’ve walked through these developments – neat rows of houses with their tidy gardens, their proud new owners unaware they’re living in future disaster zones. Research by the Grantham Research Institute found “very little evidence that developers, planners and financiers are taking into account climate change when deciding how and where to build.” They’re not ignorant. They just don’t care. The profit motive overwhelms the survival instinct.
The greenbelt—that ring of countryside around cities meant to prevent urban sprawl – is being carved up and concreted over. Every field that becomes a housing estate is a field that can no longer absorb rainwater. Every meadow that turns into a parking lot is another surface from which water runs directly into storm drains already overwhelmed. We’re creating the conditions for flooding and then acting surprised when floods arrive.
And yet there is a viable alternative – the sufficiency approach. An April 2024 London School of Economics paper by Charlotte Rogers argued the UK housing crisis should be tackled by redistributing and better utilising the existing housing stock rather than building new homes. The author pointed out that over a third of households have two or more bedrooms above the national standard, and a quarter enjoy more than double the national space standard, meaning there’s significant underutilised housing. Rogers advocated for a “sufficiency approach” that includes progressive property taxes on excess housing, regulations on second homes, policies to help empty nesters downsize, promotion of co-living arrangements, and accelerating the re-purposing of commercial properties into residential dwellings. Rogers’ conclusion is the UK doesn’t need to build more homes because there is already plenty of housing space – it’s just poorly distributed.
But the unnecessary development continues. In urban areas, the expansion of impermeable surfaces is making surface water flooding catastrophically worse. Concrete and tarmac everywhere—driveways, patios, roads, car parks. Water that once would have seeped into the earth now sheets across these surfaces, overwhelming drainage systems designed for a gentler climate. During heavy rainfall, cities become rivers. Basements fill with sewage. Cars float away. And still we build more, concrete more, expand more.
The countryside that remains is under assault from industrial agriculture – those vast fields denuded of hedgerows and trees, compacted by heavy machinery, saturated with chemicals. This land can’t hold water the way it once did. Rain that falls on these industrial farms runs straight into rivers, contributing to the flash floods that devastate communities downstream. We’ve engineered a landscape to amplify the very problem we created with our emissions.
This is overconsumption made manifest – the endless demand for new housing, new roads, new retail parks, new everything. We’re consuming the land itself, transforming it from a living system that moderates climate, into a dead surface that accelerates our demise. And for what? So, house builders can post record profits? So, we can pretend indefinite growth on a finite planet is somehow possible?
Climate Protests – Holding Government to Account
The UK’s preparations for climate change are woefully inadequate, and that’s not activist hyperbole – that’s the assessment of the government’s own Climate Change Committee. Their 2025 progress report delivers a damning verdict: “The UK’s preparations for climate change are inadequate. Delivery of effective adaptation remains limited and, despite some progress, planning for adaptation continues to be piecemeal and disjointed.”
Let that sink in. The official body tasked with monitoring our climate response says we’re failing. The Committee found no evidence – none – of “good” delivery on adaptation across any of the 46 required outcomes they assessed. Progress is either too slow, has stalled, or is heading in the wrong direction. The current government inherited a National Adaptation Programme that “fell short of the task of preparing the UK for the climate change we are experiencing today, let alone that coming in the future,” and there is little evidence of a change of course.
This catastrophic failure of government action makes climate protests not just justified, but morally imperative. When official channels fail to protect citizens from existential threats, when the institutions charged with our safety are asleep at the wheel as we hurtle toward the cliff, protest becomes more than a right – it becomes a civic duty. Climate activists aren’t disrupting business as usual – business as usual is what’s killing us.
The Imperative for Immediate Action
Every tonne of CO2 we emit contributes to global warming. Every flight, every car journey, every purchase shipped from halfway around the world. It all adds up. To stop global warming completely, CO2 emissions must reach net zero worldwide. Not reduced. Not offset. Zero. And we’re not even close. We are running out of time, and that’s not rhetoric.
This is an emergency that demands emergency responses. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. The impacts are already deadly. The government response is inadequate. Climate protests are not radical – they’re a rational response to an existential threat that authorities have failed to address with the urgency science demands.
I look out of my window at the rain that hasn’t stopped since January. Tomorrow it will rain. The day after that too. The forecasters say we might see sun next week, but they’re often wrong these days. The models weren’t built for this climate. Nothing was built for this climate. We’re improvising survival in a world we broke.
The climate emergency is here. It’s in the flooded fields, the cancelled trains, the empty supermarket shelves, the insurance companies abandoning entire regions. It’s in the rain that won’t stop.
The question is whether we will respond with the courage and urgency that survival demands. Or whether we’ll keep sleepwalking toward catastrophe, making the small adjustments and minor reforms that feel like action but accomplish nothing, until the moment when adjustment is no longer possible and all that’s left is catastrophe.
That moment is closer than you think. It might be here already. Listen to the rain.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
