Scoping study to assess the resilience of the UK's cold supply chain to rising and extreme temperatures

The CCC is currently collecting evidence and preparing its advice for the Fourth Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA4), due for publication in 2026.

This will look to assess the risks the UK faces today and in the future, and assess adaptation actions that can be taken to reduce these risks.

As part of CCRA4, we will be developing a new output to complement the Technical Report, as produced in previous CCRAs and assesses the range of risks and opportunities facing the UK from climate change and the urgency for adaptation in the next five years.

This output - to be known as the 'Well-adapted UK report' (WA report) - will focus on the potential for key adaptation actions to reduce the climate risks threatening the achievement of key UK policy and societal outcomes and hence set out a vision for aspects of a well-adapted UK.

The WA report aims to provide a policy-relevant evidence base on effective systemic adaptation scenarios, their costs and benefits (and how these are distributed across society) and the investment needs to deliver on them.

One aspect of the WA report will consider the resilience of particularly critical sectors in the UK, and to inform these assessments we are commissioning analysis to assess the required level of resilience to minimise future rising risks associated with climate change, including quantification of a cost-optimal level of resilience.

One of the areas we are assessing in depth is the resilience of cold supply chains in the UK.

We would like to better understand how climate change could disrupt the UK's supply of essential goods that rely on a temperature-controlled supply chain.

Specifically, we are interested in assessing the exposure, vulnerability, and resilience of the UK cold chain to temperature related climate hazards and evaluating cost optimal adaptation measures for the sector.

We anticipate that the scale and complexity of the UK's cold supply chain will be difficult to analyse effectively in its entirety, so we propose developing a 'component analysis' which looks in depth at a range of tangible 'parts' of the supply chain to help build a national level picture of risk exposure and paths to resilience.

We will be commissioning this research in two parts.

The purpose of this specification is to commission Part 1 - a scoping study to develop the evidence base through a 'component analysis' covering a range of specific 'parts' of the cold supply chain which would be assessed in detail in a potential follow-on study (Part 2 - to be commissioned separately following completion of this scoping study). **** See Specification for more detail ****