Mitigation efforts, which aim to cut carbon emissions, offer some optimism. But the rate of change is too slow and, even if we do clean up our act, climate chaos is here to stay for now. “The next few decades, through to 2050, are pretty much fixed now in terms of the climate change that we’re going to get,” says Dr Tim Fox, author of several IMechE reports on the topic. “What we can influence now, with reducing our emissions, is what comes towards the end of the century.”
Until then, more people will be at risk from extreme weather than ever before. According to a 2023 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, up to 3.6 billion people – almost half the Earth’s population – are highly vulnerable to climate hazards. Conditions that were previously considered to be once in a generation now occur more frequently, while the expansion of urban areas and farmland – often into areas particularly prone to fires or floods – is introducing new dangers.
Such a combination of factors could make disasters such as the Los Angeles wildfires, Valencia floods or deadly heatwaves depressingly commonplace. But that does not mean we need to face their worst effects. Some tragedies could be reduced and others avoided entirely, thanks to some innovative engineering efforts.
Branching out
Richard Alexandre came across a “staggering” statistic about wildfires as he started to research the expected impact of the climate emergency at Imperial College London. “By the end of the century, they are going to increase by 50%, especially in regions that are not used to wildfires. We are talking about tropical forest and the Arctic Circle,” he says.
“What these areas have in common is they are very remote and they are vast… early detection systems for regions like that can be quite expensive, if you consider the current solutions.” Those options include satellites, which can detect smoke plumes over huge areas, and drones, which provide regional data from lower altitudes. Ground-based technologies, including cameras and metal oxide sensors, are also starting to be deployed in some areas.
“You’re not going to get all the vital information you need from a satellite, or from a ground-based sensor,” says Blake Goodwyn, who studied with Alexandre on the Innovation Design Engineering course, a joint programme from Imperial and the Royal College of Art in London (RCA).
“What we found is that a lot of ground-based sensors that can act on a local level are very expensive to install and have a limited amount of coverage. Beyond that, the information quality is very variable. They usually depend on smoke, and that smoke information could be prone to false positives if not mitigated from other sources.”
Solely relying on satellite technology, on the other hand, risks missing “granular” data – if a thin trail of smoke rises above the tree canopy, is it the start of a small fire that could have beneficial effects for the local environment, a campfire or a devastating blaze?
The PyriPod on the forest floor
Alexandre, Goodwyn and Karina Gunadi founded Pyri to tackle the problem. The start-up, which won the 2024 James Dyson Award, is developing an early wildfire detection device known as the PyriPod.
From the outside, the pod looks like an exotic pine cone – a deliberate choice to both blend into the forest floor and protect the internal electronics when the pod is airdropped into place. These electronics are triggered by the heat from an approaching wildfire, generating power to broadcast a shortwave radio signal.
In the planned Pyri system, signals are picked up by listening stations in the environment – either conventional radio towers or dedicated receivers – which triangulate the pod’s position. That information is then corroborated with existing weather and satellite data before an alert is sent to vulnerable communities.
The pods are designed to survive multiple fire seasons if they avoid combusting in a blaze, after which they should decompose over time, to be replaced with new devices. They are made from bio-based materials to minimise environmental impact when they do burn up and to prevent plastic pollution while in place.
Fighting fire with engineering
The Pyri team spoke to professionals and people affected by wildfires around the world as they developed the product. “What we found is that early-stage detection is really the most effective tool at mitigating potential damage,” Goodwyn says.
“Knowing about a fire as early as possible is the most critical bit of information in order to determine whether or not this is a fire that matters, something that’s going to be vital to the environment and its health, or destructive to human civilisation, or somewhere in between.”
When existing ground-based technologies do successfully capture information, they have the advantage of being very low-latency, alerting people within about 20 minutes. Satellite imagery can take about an hour. The Pyri team aims to improve on the pure satellite-based approach, in both the time taken to send an alert and confidence in alert accuracy.
In some situations, the heat from nearby fires can be detected before flames or smoke are spotted. Pyri aims to provide swift alerts by monitoring that heat – and, by using multiple triangulated pods, it could also determine a fire’s direction of travel.
Ultimately, the team hope the system could save lives. They are testing the device in different environments and plan to validate it in the field with at-risk communities around the world in 2025 and 2026.
“People are moving into areas where there were previously no towns or cities, in so-called ‘wildland-urban interfaces’,” says Alexandre. “A lot of wildfires start exactly in these spaces, because you start to have people interact with nature, and this can trigger [them].”
(Credit: Shutterstock)
While those interfaces are unlikely to have emergency infrastructure in place, one area in particular would be expected to be ready for wildfires: California. The destruction in January 2025 showed that even the best-prepared populated areas are at risk. “Every community has a very complex context for wildfire management,” says Alexandre. “The LA fires helped a lot of [at-risk] places to see that even California, a place that is known for being well-prepared for wildfire, struggled… It’s hard to tell if we could have supported LA or not, because we’re not so close to the situation.”
When fires do break out and pose a risk to communities, other engineering-led solutions could help. Researchers at the University of Bristol are developing drone “swarms” to detect and extinguish blazes. The project, which involves Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service and AI technology developed at the University of Sheffield, uses Windracers Ultra uncrewed aircraft capable of carrying 100kg of fire retardant.
In tests at Predannack Airfield in Cornwall last year, the drones used AI-enhanced thermal and optical imaging to detect and investigate fires, sending information to fire and rescue teams. If deployed, they could use swarm technology developed at Bristol to “intelligently self-coordinate”, deploying retardant to extinguish a blaze before monitoring the situation and returning to base.
In the worst-case scenario of fires reaching urban environments, fire-resistant materials can protect buildings from destruction. Some surviving structures from the LA fires used modern cladding materials, as well as conventional options such as concrete walls and metal roofs.
Holding back the flood
Flooding is another hazard that could be avoided using new materials. Kiacrete is a “puddle-free pavement surface” designed to prevent floods after extreme rainfall. The issue can cost the UK billions of pounds a year and the problem is set to get worse.
“Current infrastructure is not capable of addressing the amount of rainfall that it is receiving,” says developer Dr Alalea Kia, a UKRI Future Leaders fellow and a Royal Academy of Engineering associate research fellow at Imperial College. “Our drainage infrastructure is also quickly overwhelmed when we have extreme rainfall events. So our aim is to come up with technologies that can potentially replace it over time.”
Designed to be used in everything from footpaths to cycle routes and airport infrastructure, Kiacrete is a “permeable pavement” technology that lets water drain straight through. Other materials that offer similar properties are easily blocked by debris in flowing water, says Kia. They also have low strength and durability, needing to be replaced within 10 years. Kiacrete, on the other hand, is designed to last at least 40 years. Its high permeability means an Olympic-sized swimming pool with a Kiacrete bottom would completely drain in just 40 seconds, Kia claims. The material is made of high-strength concrete or low-carbon and cement-free concrete for lower environmental impact. Pores on the surface are 6mm across and go straight down to prevent blockages.
Dr Alalea Kia created permeable pavement Kiacrete to combat flooding
Lab testing showed the material is twice as strong (over 70 megapascals) and 10 times more permeable (water drains at over 4cm per second) than conventional permeable concrete, according to Kia. If the soil beneath is suitable, water can drain through to recharge the groundwater table. If not, it is prevented by an impermeable layer. The team also plans to include storage tanks for storm water management, which could feed into the drainage network or be used for irrigation and toilet flushing in areas that need it.
Manufacturing – which can be on or off site – was challenging to develop due to concrete’s changing properties as it hardens. “You can’t just drill the holes through because the material is very hard and we need a substantial number of holes. With our in situ system, we have a recycled plastic formwork that creates these holes and permanently stays in the concrete.” The team is also developing a plastic-free method to improve sustainability.
Kia hopes Kiacrete could prevent flooding and save lives. “We want to see Kiacrete being used in urban areas,” she says. “We get a lot of rainfall as a result of climate change. We will have the opportunity for this water to have somewhere to go. So it can enhance lives, the environment and also the economy.”
The new material will be installed this spring, in a frequently flooded Liverpool cycle path. The team hopes the deployment will demonstrate its benefits and lead to wider use.
Clean cooling
If it was once possible to ignore the growing signs of the climate emergency, we no longer have that luxury – and engineers are reacting. Emissions cuts from climate change mitigation get a lot of the attention, but climate change adaptation is growing in stature.
“Those of us that work within the community… have noticed a real step up in the level of interest,” says Fox, who is chair of IMechE’s working group on climate change adaptation. “Having worked in this area for at least 15 years, we can see around us now, every day, tangible impacts from climate change and extreme weather events that are attributable to climate change.” Rising temperatures is one of the most obvious symptoms. The United Nations Environment Programme’s October 2024 Emissions Gap Report said the world is on track for 2.6ºC to 3.1ºC of warming compared with pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. In January, the European Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that 2024 was the first year to pass 1.5ºC warming above the pre-industrial average.
The rise in temperatures and increase in heatwaves is a significant problem for the UK, which has both natural and built environments suited for lower temperatures. As the mercury rises, people suffer heat exhaustion, heat stress and disrupted sleep. This affects cognitive ability, in turn causing more accidents.
“If the temperature is extreme and it goes on for too many days, people will die,” says Fox. “It’s quite simple – it impacts mortality. We’ve seen that in several heatwaves in recent years, where thousands have died.” A study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health found almost 62,000 heat-related deaths in Europe during the 2022 heatwaves.
Other issues include breakdowns in the food system, causing produce to rot, and issues with medicines and vaccines, which are temperature-sensitive and require cold storage.
One of the solutions is widespread cooling – everywhere from the home and the workplace to hospitals, factories and digital infrastructure, according to Fox, who is co-author of Cop28 briefing note The Hot Reality: Living in a +50°C World. But this needs to be done sustainably. Cooling contributes 7-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions from the energy required and the refrigerants used. “If we are going to dramatically increase the amount of cooling to cope with heatwaves and extreme heat events, then we need to make sure that it’s ‘clean cooling’,” says Fox.
That approach, which the consultant said should be labelled critical national infrastructure – along with assets such as energy, water and transportation – at an IMechE event last year, first involves consideration of passive, nature-based solutions, drawing on traditional approaches used in the architecture of hot countries.
This includes optimising the orientation of buildings to minimise solar gain – the increase in temperature from sunlight – and take advantage of breezes. These traditional approaches – including Iranian windcatchers, which channel cool breezes into homes – can be combined with modern engineering techniques such as computational fluid dynamics to maximise air flows and fine-tune thermodynamics.
Other low-energy techniques include drawing water from reservoirs into the walls of buildings, says Fox, a method already used in hot countries. In future, phase-change materials could also be built into roofs, ceilings and walls to absorb cool temperatures at night, then “give out” that cooling by melting and turning into a liquid during the day. If air conditioning is needed, it should then be as low-carbon and efficient as possible.
Sunswap use mobile solar panels to power refrigeration systems
Outside of the built environment, mobile cooling will become vital for food, medicine and vaccines, in vehicles with cooled cargo space. Typically, this uses small fossil fuel-powered engines, but some cleaner options use biomethane. Surrey firm Sunswap goes even further by using solar panels on top of cargo sections, such as trailers on articulated lorries, to power refrigeration systems.
Cold stores themselves can be used like thermal batteries, Fox suggests. When there is excess electricity, it can be used to cool refrigerated rooms to lower temperatures than needed for food safety, such as -25ºC. When electricity demand increases, refrigeration can be switched off, only turning on again once the temperature rises to a set point.
As temperatures increase, regularly threatening people’s comfort and health, personal cooling devices could become popular. The Reon Pocket device from Sony uses a heat pump-like thermal module, known as a Peltier element, to cool the wearer’s body on one side and expel heat on the other. Wearable fans and ice vests are available from other companies.
‘A huge role for engineers’
One of the main challenges for companies, according to Fox, will be making solutions commercially attractive. Policymakers and infrastructure developers see adaptation as an additional cost – they should instead see it as a way to prevent further costs down the line.
“There’s a huge role for engineers in doing that,” he says. “Taking something that we have, in terms of really innovative technology, and making it easy to substitute it into the existing infrastructure and built environment… but to do it in such a way that it’s really affordable and there’s a really solid business case.”
The focus on climate change adaptation will only accelerate as society reckons with what is to come. Many researchers and entrepreneurs are already focusing on the topic, including in prominent ecosystems such as the Imperial College and RCA collaboration. Others will likely follow.
Extreme weather is “the new reality for society,” says Alexandre at Pyri. Climate mitigation is needed to prevent the worst from happening in the next decades. But when extreme weather does hit, climate adaptation could help us avert disaster.
Join IMechE this Thursday (1 May) for a panel discussion on Place-based Skills for Climate Mitigation and Adaptation, in partnership with British Expertise International. The in-person panel will explore how localised engineering practices can address the challenges of climate change by creating sustainable, adaptable, and resilient communities. Panellists will showcase successful examples of place-based skilling for climate mitigation and adaptation, including case studies from the UK and globally.
Get the latest expertise from the world’s leading authorities on the topic at IMechE’s International Conference on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience, running from 14-15 October at the institution’s headquarters at One Birdcage Walk, London.
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