31/07/2026
The UK is having its fourth heatwave of the summer. Wildfires have burned over 21,000 hectares since May - from Cairngorms to Edinburgh to the Peak District - and more than 2,700 excess deaths have already been linked to the May and June heatwaves alone. This isn't a "hot day" story anymore. It's becoming the new normal, and it's forcing a conversation the UK hasn't had to have at this scale before: who actually gets to stay cool.
That got us asking: what does climate resilience look like when heat isn't just weather, but inequality?
The climate heat conversation has a blind spot. It talks about heatwaves as something everyone experiences together, while ignoring who gets to escape the heat, and who doesn't.
South Asian and Pacific families didn't start bearing the worst of extreme heat by accident. The homes we rent are heat traps with no heat-proofing support. Emergency heat warnings still don't reliably reach non-English-speaking households. Migrant workers can't slow down when it's 35°C, because a paused shift is unpaid. We just stopped naming these as equity issues. As part of our Planet Pact collab series for South Asian Heritage Month (est. by South Asian Heritage Trust), we're looking at heat as inequality, not just weather.
We connect the wheat farmer in Punjab watching his yield fall, to the garment worker in Katunayake who can't slow down at 40°C, to the grandmother in Māngere or Whitechapel cooking for three generations in a flat that traps the day's heat into the night, to the delivery driver in the Midlands working through a heat alert because they can't afford to stop.
South Asian communities contributed minimally to the climate crisis in global emissions terms. And yet we're among the most exposed to it on the subcontinent, and in the diaspora cities facing the hottest summer on record.
Who in your family has had to work, cook, or care for others through extreme heat, with no real way to slow down?
