Story | 24 June 2026
PML scientists contribute to significant UK climate risk assessment, warning of accelerating impacts
Scientists from PML have contributed to the Fourth UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, a recently published major independent technical report that delivers the most comprehensive and urgent picture of climate risk to the UK to date.
Greenwich Park, heatwave 2022. CC BY-SA 2.0, Alisdare Hickson
Bringing PML’s expertise in marine ecosystems, ocean biogeochemistry and marine biodiversity, PML’s Dr Sevrine Sailley served as a lead author on ‘Chapter 5: Land, Nature and Food’ along with Prof. Ana Queirós and Dr Yuri Artioli as contributing authors.
Assessing the risk
The report assesses 41 risks and two opportunities across five sectors: Health and Wellbeing; Built Environment; Land, Nature and Food; Infrastructure, and Economy. By 2050, with global warming reaching 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, a number of these risks are assessed as being of Very High magnitude. This category has been newly introduced in this assessment to capture impacts in the order of billions of pounds of economic damage per year, thousands of deaths per year or the loss of species groups.
Overall, climate risks to the UK were assessed as being higher than in the previous assessment (CCRA3, 2021), driven by new evidence of accelerating climate change, increases in exposure and vulnerability, and a lack of sufficient adaptation progress.
Ocean life under increasing pressure
The ‘Land, Nature and Food’ chapter, to which PML scientists played a key role in producing, set out the scale of climate change impacts across both terrestrial and marine environments.
The seas around the UK are warming rapidly with around four more marine heatwave events per year compared to the 1980s. Populations of UK seabirds, such as puffins, storm petrels and Arctic skuas, could decline by up to 80% by the 2050s due to warming seas and reduced prey availability, and by 2100 climate-induced shifts in marine habitats are projected to threaten the effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas.
Fisheries and aquaculture also face mounting risks. Warming seas are already shifting species distributions: coldwater fish such as cod have declined in the North Sea, while warmwater species are becoming more common. Future losses for fisheries could be severe, with the northwest Atlantic projected to face a 12% average loss of fish by mid-century and up to 35% by 2100.
If these risks were not enough, the chapter also highlights that recent evidence increases confidence that ocean carbon sequestration is declining, adding to concerns about the long-term role of the ocean as a carbon sink and how this may help accelerate climate change further.
Urgent adaptation action needed
The UK’s climate has already warmed by around 0.25 °C per decade since the 1980s — faster than the global average. Sea levels around the UK have risen by more than 19 cm since 1901, with two thirds of that rise occurring in the last 30 years alone.
Across all sectors, the report concludes that current and planned adaptation measures are not sufficient to manage the identified risks. Nearly two thirds of all risks require increased adaptation action and adaptation plans are not keeping pace with the rate of climate change.
PML’s involvement in CCRA4 reflects the laboratory’s long-standing and internationally-recognised role in marine monitoring and understanding the health of the ocean. The assessment’s marine findings draw directly on the kind of sustained ocean observation and modelling research that PML conducts through programmes including the Western Channel Observatory and its work on marine biodiversity, ocean acidification and ecosystem modelling.
