Hotter summers draw residents and home buyers toward Scotland

At least 35,000 excess deaths thought to have been linked to Europe’s heat

Scottish Highlands real-estate agents told NPR that more buyers were citing cooler summers as a factor in their home-buying decisions. NPR reported that recent figures showed house prices in Scotland rose year over year while prices fell in southeastern England and Greater London. Across Europe, NPR reported signs that climate is beginning to influence where many people choose to live, alongside factors including jobs, housing and the economy.

Scientists cited by NPR said Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent. Large areas of Europe saw scorching temperatures this summer, with widespread wildfires and at least 35,000 excess deaths thought to have been linked to the heat. As climate change intensifies, countries around the world are grappling with more extreme impacts. At this year’s U.N. General Assembly, Nepal’s prime minister, Balendra Shah, called recent flash floods in his country “a warning to the world” and urged a “culture of preparedness” for future climate crises.

NPR reported that August shattered global heat records.

The decisions began with discomfort in homes and concern about hotter conditions. Mike Coe, 69, never thought he would leave his “dream home” in rural Worcestershire, not far from Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. His concern began with research into warming temperatures in the region while his job involved making videos for environmental activists. Ten years ago, Coe read scientific papers and discussed climate change’s effects with colleagues. “I realized that it was likely to get very, very hot in the British Midlands, even during my lifetime,” Coe told NPR. “I said… I think we need to move to Scotland.” Susan Chinnery and her partner Steve Lewis had lived near Milton Keynes, 50 miles north of London, where the summer months became increasingly uncomfortable. “I hate the hot weather,” Chinnery told NPR. “I remember 2022 when Steve and I… we were actually sleeping outside on the patio because it was just too hot to sleep indoors.” Like many British homes, their Victorian-era house was designed to keep in the warmth and did not have air conditioning.

The moves led the couples to different northern settings. A decade later, Coe and his partner Lizzie Stoodley live on the Isle of Skye off Scotland’s west coast, where they built a highly energy-efficient Passivhaus, the second home they had built. NPR reported that Coe and Stoodley were glad they had built their new home where they did. “Our decision to move seems to have been confirmed as being the right one, particularly this year,” Coe told NPR. Friends who still live farther south described this summer as “unbelievably hot” and “incredibly uncomfortable,” as the United Kingdom had its hottest summer on record, with five successive heat waves and widespread drought. While southern regions warmed up, the weather on the Isle of Skye remained temperate. “I think there are quite a few more very hot summers I might escape by living here rather than remaining where we did,” Coe said. Others are considering the same move. Last year, Chinnery and Lewis moved to Westray, one of the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland, largely because of rising temperatures. Lewis said 2022 reminded him of the famously hot British summer of 1976 and made him realize it was only going to get warmer. “I thought to myself, it’s arrived,” he told NPR. “This is the slow and inexorable decline into some new state.”

NPR reported that Europe’s heat wave fueled drought, wildfires and fears about energy supplies.

Other relocations show how climate risk can enter decisions alongside personal circumstances. In 2017, Melissa Terras moved her family from Letchworth Garden City, a town 40 miles north of London, to Edinburgh, partly because of climate change. A professor at the University of Edinburgh, Terras chose a house “up a hill,” mindful of rising sea levels. “When I mentioned climate change to people as one of the reasons why we were going to move north, people laughed,” Terras told NPR. “They were like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Terras said more people are now thinking as she did several years ago.

Some Americans are already making the move to Scotland. Jason Sorensen, a California native, moved with his wife, Christine, to Golspie in the Scottish Highlands last year. After experiencing wildfires in Los Angeles and hot summers while working in London, Sorensen said “something broke” inside him and decided he wanted to live somewhere cooler.

More broadly, NPR reported that people who said they wanted to live in Scotland for the weather would not long ago have been laughed at, while for many living farther south it seems the joke is no longer quite so funny. The interviews describe a shift in attitudes alongside housing decisions, but they do not provide a count of climate-driven moves.

Gaia Vince, a London-based journalist and author of Nomad Century, predicts climate change will drive hundreds of millions of people from hotter regions toward more temperate areas this century. She said the United Kingdom has already felt those effects: “We’ve had five almost consecutive heat waves this year alone, and our infrastructure is built for a completely different climate — everything is built for a climate which no longer exists.” Vince said Britain will also see migration as people adapt their lifestyles and infrastructure. Wealthier individuals are already moving toward places such as Ireland and Scotland in search of a more livable climate, she said. Vince also expects the Great Lakes region and Alaska could attract people from farther south in the United States.

“Between now and 2100, there really are only a few places that you could categorize as ‘best of the worst’ oases if things really go to hell,” Sorensen told NPR. “Certain parts of Norway, the South Island of New Zealand, maybe southern Chile down near the Lake District, maybe certain parts of Alaska — and northern Scotland.”