Ten years ago, one of the telecoms industry’s biggest infrastructure challenges was rolling out 4G. Since then, telecoms has transformed – and the environment our infrastructure operates in has changed with it.
Summer 2026 was the UK’s hottest on record. In the first nine months of 2026 alone we’ve faced heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and flash-flood warnings. And climate projections suggest conditions like these will become increasingly familiar.
For those of us responsible for the critical national infrastructure people rely on every day, that means thinking about resilience in an entirely different way – shifting the focus from a single network to the continuity of the service people rely on.
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In telecoms, the physical impacts of climate change can quickly become real issues for our customers. And while operators are already taking steps to prepare their networks – from backup power and cooling to flood protection and longer-term climate risk planning – resilience doesn’t begin and end at the boundaries of an individual network. It has to be thought about in the context of the UK’s digital infrastructure system.
The Telecommunications Security Act has already required operators to take a more systemic approach to identifying risks and preparing for disruption. Climate risk now needs the same operational discipline to ensure the connectivity that keeps our economy and national security running stays reliable.
We need to think beyond the resilience of individual networks
Our networks don’t exist in isolation. We are all connected to a much wider digital ecosystem, and increasingly dependent on other critical infrastructure too. Transport is an obvious example. Telecoms networks depend on roads and transport links remaining accessible so engineers can reach critical sites.
That means we need to look beyond the resilience of individual networks and think about the resilience of the system as a whole.
Climate risks don’t arrive neatly one at a time, and the impact of an event in one part of our critical national infrastructure can quickly be felt elsewhere. We’ve seen this come to life in extreme weather events. A heatwave can increase cooling demand at the same time as the power system is under strain, and flooding can damage equipment and prevent engineers from reaching it.
Each individual operator – whether that be the telecoms company or highways authority – has plans for each disruption scenario. The challenge is that those plans need to work when the same event puts several dependencies under pressure at once.
Working together, with government, regulators and the other infrastructure industries we depend on is therefore more vital than ever. Climate adaptation is a strategic national issue. We need to start treating it as one.
Adaptation has to change the infrastructure decisions we make today
Thinking differently about climate resilience also means thinking differently about the decisions we make today. Identifying climate risks is important, but simply recognizing or reporting them isn’t enough. The real value comes when those risks start to influence how businesses plan, invest and operate.
Telecoms infrastructure is built to operate for years, often decades. We can’t predict the exact weather at a particular site in 2040, but we can make decisions now that remain sensible across a credible range of future conditions and identify what would trigger a different course through climate scenario planning.
Climate considerations therefore need to be part of long term decisions from capital investment and network planning to executive governance. That isn’t always straightforward.
One of the challenges with climate change is its unpredictability. We can see patterns in the science and data, but there isn’t a neat, linear pathway that tells a business exactly what conditions its infrastructure will face in five, ten or twenty years’ time. A lot of the impact we are experiencing today is unchartered territory for humanity as a whole, let alone infrastructure.
Part of the answer is translating climate risk into the language businesses already use to make decisions. For telecoms, that means talking about resilience, reliability, efficiency and investment – and recognizing that these priorities are often more closely connected than we might think.
We’ve seen that with net zero. Many of the actions needed to decarbonize networks are also ones that can make them more efficient, more reliable and more resilient. Reducing energy consumption is an obvious example: it can lower emissions while improving efficiency and reducing exposure to energy costs. Rather than treating net zero, adaptation and network resilience as separate agendas, we should increasingly look at where the same infrastructure decisions can help deliver all three.
After all, telecoms is first and foremost an infrastructure business. And if we are investing in infrastructure that will be operating for years to come, resilience to a changing climate needs to be part of how we decide what – and where – to invest.
Uncertainty is often treated as a reason to wait. But when investing in long-lived infrastructure, I believe it should be a reason to keep our options open.
Adaptation needs greater priority
For years, the climate conversation in telecoms has rightly focused on how we reduce our impact on the climate. But as its physical effects become increasingly visible, we need to give the other side of that conversation much greater attention too: how a changing climate will affect the infrastructure we all rely on.
No individual operator has the full picture. The systems telecoms depend on span different companies, sectors and regulatory frameworks, which makes climate resilience a shared challenge as well as an individual one.
A more collaborative approach could help strengthen resilience across sectors. That could include common climate scenarios, cross-sector stress testing, agreed restoration priorities, clearer protocols for sharing information during disruption.
In the event of a storm, power resilience is an example. Imposing a higher duty of cooperation and data sharing between Distribution Network Operators and telecoms companies would help mitigation to be deployed appropriately.
Government and regulators also have a role in convening this work – however, we cannot wait for climate adaptation to become another compliance exercise. We should compete on service and innovation, while collaborating on risks no company can manage alone.
We can’t know exactly what conditions our networks will face in the decades ahead. But we do know that the climate they operate in is changing. The challenge now is to make sure the infrastructure we invest in today is ready for the world it will need to operate in tomorrow.
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Dana Haidan
