National climate adaptation strategy is, on paper, well resourced. England's Warm Homes Plan now channels record capital investment into home upgrades; official statistics show fuel poverty under the government's headline metric easing slightly, from 9.9% of English households in 2024 to 9.4% in 2025.¹ But a second, less-quoted measure from the same statistics release tells a different story: 30.4% of households, some 7.6 million, are still spending more than a tenth of their income just to stay warm.¹ Somewhere between the policy and the household, the gap is not closing so much as it is changing shape.

Birmingham is where that gap becomes visible. 23.2% of households across Birmingham are in fuel poverty citywide², the highest proportion of any local authority in England, roughly double the national LILEE rate. Newly arrived and low-income residents often living in some of the city’s least energy-efficient housing. These groups also face barriers that make them less likely to be reached through national surveys (limited English, no existing relationship with a local authority or energy advice service). What does adaptation delivery look like once we stop assuming the household is reachable by default?

Knowing is not the same as doing

Climate Transition 2100 CIC (CT2100 CIC)'s Resilient Homes. Resilient Neighbours pilot, with National Lottery Community Fund support, provide platform for neighbours to share their practical solutions responding extreme weather. At the programme's Summer Energy Saving & Cooling Workshop at Illimitable Space, Birmingham on 20 June 2026, residents spent a morning with a qualified Domestic Energy Assessor working through boiler efficiency, EPC ratings and cooling technique. Self-rated confidence rose across every topic; the largest jump was in indoor cooling skills. But boiler operation stayed the lowest-confidence topic even after direct, expert teaching. Several residents said they still couldn't operate their own boiler correctly, despite having just been shown how.

This is a small data point with a large implication. A significant share of adaptation and energy-efficiency spending is still built on an information-deficit model: if people understood their EPC certificate or their boiler timer, they would use them correctly. CT2100 CIC's early evidence suggests the deficit isn't only informational, it's practical, and it persists even after competent, well-delivered instruction. Closing it may require in-home, hands-on follow-up as a standard design feature of adaptation programmes, not an optional add-on for the households that ask twice.

Adaptation is hyperlocal, and it doesn't template well

A second finding cuts against how adaptation programmes are usually scoped. CT2100 CIC's Summer Energy Saving & Cooling Workshop was framed, deliberately, around summer heat. Yet across every discussion group, residents kept returning to winter: cold draughts, condensation, mould that returns no matter how often it's cleaned. Many participants, having grown up in Hong Kong's subtropical climate, found a British winter, not a British heatwave, to be the genuinely unfamiliar threat. A generic UK climate-adaptation brief, however well designed, will misjudge which risk actually worries a given community unless it is built with that community rather than issued to it. The dialogue-based format CT2100 CIC uses (structured peer conversation rather than a lecture) is as much a diagnostic tool as an engagement one. It surfaces the actual risk register a community is carrying.

Cooling cannot become the next carbon problem

The sector's dominant response to rising heat risk is still mechanical, and this summer showed how fast that response can scale. During June's record UK heat, Currys reported portable air conditioner sales up 330% and fan sales up nearly 3,000% over a single weekend, with one installer describing enquiry volumes around thirty times higher than normal.3 Most of what sold is the least efficient option available: portable units already make up the majority of the UK's domestic air-con stock, and running one for eight hours in summer is estimated to produce around 4.87kg of CO₂, roughly equivalent to an 18-mile drive.3 This is not a one-off panic buy. The UK's official climate advisers project that around 22% of British homes will need some form of active cooling once global warming reaches 2°C, meaning demand of this kind is a structural trend, not a heatwave spike. CT2100 CIC's next step, a July session building DIY cooling solutions directly with residents, is a deliberate attempt to hold both goals at once: comfort during heatwaves without a corresponding rise in energy use or emissions. It is a modest, low-cost intervention, but it is also a useful challenge to any adaptation programme or household that treats heat resilience and decarbonisation as separate line items.

Towards a replicable model

None of this is presented as a finished answer. It is a 12-month pilot, and CT2100 CIC is explicit that the ambition sits beyond Birmingham: a climate resilience hub model, community-led, multilingual, dialogue-first, that any locality facing similar gaps could adapt. The organisation is documenting its process. For peer organisations grappling with how to make national adaptation strategy land in the households current metrics struggle to see, Birmingham's Hong Kong community may be an unlikely but instructive place to be watching.