The paradox in plain sight
Spring 2025 was the driest in England for more than a century. April was the sunniest ever recorded and the third-warmest. By August, five of the Environment Agency's operational areas were officially in drought; nearly half of England's reservoirs were classed as notably or exceptionally low. Hosepipe bans were in force for more than eight million households. Report after report, official statement after official statement, reached for the same explanation: climate change.
Then the rain came. Winter 2025-26 brought fifty consecutive days of rainfall in parts of Devon and Cornwall — one of the rainiest seasons on record. February 2026 delivered 170 per cent of the long-term average rainfall. By March, reservoir storage had reached 95 per cent. England was declared drought-free for the first time since May 2025. And report after report, official statement after official statement, reached for the same explanation: climate change.
The reasonable person — the one who read both sets of stories without specialist knowledge — could be forgiven for asking a simple question: which is it?
The coin lands both ways
The Environment Agency's press release of March 2026 is, in its own way, a remarkable document. Its headline — England recovered from drought as weather whiplash sees floods — and its opening statement: "Our changing climate means we will likely experience more rapid swings between drought and flooding — sometimes referred to as weather whiplash," encapsulates the problem: which is it, drought or flooding? The then Water Minister, attending the National Drought Group meeting, added: "Despite our recent wet weather, we must still talk about drought. Our climate is changing, droughts are becoming increasingly common, and we need to be prepared."
This is worth pausing on. The same press release that announced England's recovery from drought — reservoirs full, rivers running — simultaneously insisted that drought was still the primary concern. Drought caused by climate change had been followed by flooding caused by climate change, and the conclusion drawn from both was: prepare for more drought.
There is a coherent argument buried in here. But it is not the one being communicated.
The problem of the unfalsifiable argument
The question this raises is a simple one: what weather event would not be attributed to climate change? A dry summer — climate change. A wet winter — climate change. Record heat — climate change. An unseasonably cold spring — climate change. If every outcome confirms the hypothesis, the hypothesis is doing something other than explaining. It is functioning as a narrative frame into which any evidence can be fitted.
To be absolutely clear: this is not an argument that the underlying science is wrong. The scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming and is not the subject of serious dispute among climate scientists. What is being questioned here is not the science — it is the communication of it. And the distinction matters, because poor communication of correct science can be just as damaging, in its own way, as misinformation.
What the science actually says — and why it is not being said
There is, in fact, a coherent scientific account of why both drought and flooding can be consequences of climate change. It is called hydroclimate whiplash — the intensification of swings between weather extremes driven by the acceleration of the hydrological cycle as global temperatures rise. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, intensifying precipitation when it comes; higher temperatures also accelerate evaporation, deepening droughts when rain is absent. The result is not simply more rain or less rain, but sharper oscillation between the two.
Scientists have documented this effect globally. Shorter-term swings between extremes have become roughly a third to two-thirds more frequent in recent decades. In Europe and the UK, these swings are driven significantly by the behaviour of the jet stream — the fast-moving current of air high in the atmosphere whose position determines whether the UK receives Atlantic weather systems or sits under blocking high pressure. Climate change appears to be influencing jet stream behaviour, though the precise mechanisms are still an active area of research.
The cost: scepticism as a rational response
When a theory is presented in a way that makes it appear to explain everything, reasonable people become sceptical. This is not the same as denialism — and conflating the two is itself part of the problem.
The person who reads about a hosepipe ban caused by climate change, and then six months later reads about flooding caused by climate change, and concludes that someone is bending the evidence to fit a predetermined conclusion — that person is not stupid. They are not a climate denier. They are responding rationally to a communications strategy that has, however unintentionally, made the theory look unfalsifiable. The appropriate response to that scepticism is not to dismiss it as ignorance, but to provide the actual explanation that the reporting failed to give.
There is a further consequence that rarely gets named. Because climate attribution in press reporting is so catch-all, it becomes very difficult to hold policy and infrastructure decisions to account. If drought and flood are both simply "climate change" — an external force acting upon us — then extreme weather events are implicitly framed not as failures of planning or investment, but as acts of a changing nature. The frame, however unintentionally, functions as a kind of alibi. Questions about whether reservoir capacity has kept pace with population growth, whether planning permissions in flood-prone areas were well-considered, or whether infrastructure investment over the past two decades was adequate — all of these become harder to ask when every adverse event is attributed to forces beyond human policy control.
Three problems for planning
For planners specifically, the confused communication of climate science creates three distinct and serious problems.
The first is technical. Planners need to understand hydroclimate whiplash not as a rhetorical phrase but as a genuine design condition. A Strategic Flood Risk Assessment conducted in the aftermath of a drought year, or a Water Cycle Study produced following a wet winter, captures a snapshot of conditions that may be inverted within twelve months. Infrastructure designed to manage one type of extreme may be inadequate — or actively counterproductive — for the other. Sustainable drainage systems designed primarily to attenuate flood events need simultaneously to consider water retention and reuse for drought resilience. These objectives are not incompatible, but they require integrated thinking. The current policy framework does not routinely require it: flood risk sits in Chapter 14 of the NPPF; water supply and infrastructure is addressed separately through utility companies and Water Cycle Studies. There is no standard mechanism that requires a developer or local planning authority to assess how a site will perform across the full range of the hydroclimate whiplash cycle.
There is a further irony that the planning framework itself illustrates. The Environment Agency, in its March 2026 press release, insisted that despite the floods, drought remained the primary concern. The NPPF, by contrast, devotes its entire policy architecture to flooding — with drought appearing just once, in a subordinate list in paragraph 162. The regulator warns of drought; the policy prepares for flood. Between the two sits the planning profession, asked to address both without a framework that integrates either.
The policy framework encodes this gap at the level of its own structure. Chapter 14 of the NPPF — headed "Meeting the challenge of climate change, flooding and coastal change" — requires that planning applications take into account "the full range of potential climate change impacts." That obligation is, on its face, broad enough to encompass drought. But a search of the entire NPPF reveals just one reference to drought, in paragraph 162, where it appears briefly alongside overheating as a subordinate item in a list. Flooding, by contrast, receives an entire chapter, detailed sequential and exception tests, and specific technical requirements. The policy says full range; the architecture addresses half of it. And that half maps precisely onto the narrative that press reporting has normalised — that climate change, in planning terms, means water coming in rather than water running out.
The second problem is political. Even a planner who fully understands the nuance operates in a public arena where debate is shaped by simplified narratives. The planning officer who explains to a committee that a site must be designed for simultaneous flood resilience and drought resilience — because climate change intensifies both extremes — faces the almost inevitable challenge from the floor: "but it's been raining solidly for two months." The technically correct position is structurally vulnerable in the political forum. Planners are caught between the scientific truth they need to act on and the political environment in which they must defend their decisions. This is not a new problem for the profession; but the confused state of public climate communication makes it significantly worse.
The third problem is accountability. Simplified climate attribution obscures the real policy questions. If planning is to respond effectively to hydroclimate whiplash — designing for extremes in both directions, integrating flood and drought resilience into a coherent framework, investing in the infrastructure that resilience requires — then the mechanism needs to be understood, not just the label. And if policy fails, the failure needs to be nameable. An intellectual environment in which every weather event confirms the same conclusion, regardless of what that conclusion is asked to explain, is not one in which effective policy accountability is easy to maintain.
What honest communication would look like
None of this is an argument against taking climate change seriously. On the contrary: the case for robust, long-term climate adaptation in planning is strengthened, not weakened, by communicating the science accurately. The hydroclimate whiplash thesis — properly explained — is a more compelling and actionable argument for integrated flood and drought resilience than the catch-all attribution of every weather event to a single cause. It gives planners, policymakers, and the public something to actually work with.
What honest communication requires is the discipline to explain the mechanism, not just apply the label. To say not simply "this drought is caused by climate change" but to explain how a warming atmosphere intensifies the hydrological cycle, sharpens weather extremes, and produces the oscillations that can take a landscape from hosepipe bans to flood warnings within a single calendar year. That is a harder argument to make in a newspaper report or a ministerial press release. But it is the argument that the evidence actually supports — and the one that serves the public, and the planning decisions the public depends upon, most honestly.
The alternative is a communications strategy that, however well-intentioned, teaches people to be sceptical of the very science it is trying to promote. That is a cost the climate debate — and the planning profession — cannot afford.