This is Story 2 is a part of the 5 Generations series. I showed you what climate failure looks like for vulnerable people in the United Kingdom. Now I am showing you what climate success delivers. Same five people. Same five generations. Different choices. Based on UK Net Zero pathways and Climate Change Committee scenarios, this is what happens when we act with the courage and urgency this crisis demands.

The 5 Generations Hopeful Series. Story 2 of 10

Story 2: Your son, aged 10, 2035: The Summer That Works, The Hopeful Future

It is July 2035. Your son, just turned ten, races his bike through the new green corridor that connects your West Midlands neighbourhood to the city centre.

He remembers when his dad told him about the transformation.

How these corridors used to be overgrown railway sidings and abandoned land. How people fought for years to connect them, to make them safe, to plant the trees that now provide this blessed shade. His dad still has photographs on his phone of the planting days, when hundreds of volunteers put saplings into the ground that are now taller than houses.

The morning air is fresh, cooled by the canopy of trees that arch overhead. He passes the community orchard where volunteers are picking early apples, waves to the elderly man who tends the wildflower verges, and narrowly avoids a squirrel that darts across the path ahead of him. This is his commute to school, and he loves every metre of it.

The temperature is warm, yes. We could not stop all the warming.

But it peaks at 32°C rather than the 38°C+ that would have occurred without the rapid decarbonisation of the 2020s. More importantly, the urban forest strategy implemented over the past decade means the temperature in these shaded green spaces is 3-5°C cooler than the surrounding streets.

His school installed passive cooling systems five years ago as part of the national Building Retrofit Programme.

Large windows that once created dangerous greenhouse conditions now have adaptive shading. Green roofs absorb heat. Natural ventilation systems mean that even on the warmest days, the classrooms remain comfortable. No child has collapsed from heat in a UK school since 2028.

Your son is one of the beneficiaries of a systematic transformation. He breathes air that is dramatically cleaner than what you breathed as a child. The phasing out of fossil fuel vehicles, completed in 2030, means nitrogen dioxide levels in British cities have fallen by 70%.

“The 28,000 premature deaths from air pollution that occurred annually in the 2020s have been cut by more than half”

THE REALITY: Under the Climate Change Committee’s Balanced Pathway to net zero, decisive action in the 2020s limited additional warming to manageable levels.

By 2035, the UK’s renewable energy transition (95% low-carbon electricity by 2030) has delivered cleaner air, with reductions preventing approximately 14,000 deaths annually.

The Building Retrofit Programme, accelerated after 2025, means energy-efficient homes maintain comfortable temperatures naturally. Urban greening strategies reduce the urban heat island effect by 2-3°C in major cities.

(Sources: Climate Change Committee Balanced Pathway, The Lancet health co-benefits analysis, Royal Society clean air benefits)

He locks his bike in the secure shelter, solar panels on its roof charging the school’s battery system, and runs inside to find his friends. The corridors are cool and calm. The classrooms smell of plants from the living walls that filter the air. His teacher is preparing a lesson about the transformation, because this week marks the tenth anniversary of the Climate Action Act that made all of this possible.

At lunch, he sits with his friends under the shade sail in the playground, eating food from the school garden that the children helped grow. The tomatoes are warm from the sun, sweet and bursting. The conversation turns to the weekend, to the new splash park that opened in the regenerated town centre, to the camping trip one family is planning in the rewilded national park.

But your son is also learning something else. He is learning that summer means adventure. His city invested in green spaces where children can play safely, even on warm days. That his asthmatic friend down the road has fewer attacks every year because the air is cleaner. He is learning that adults can be trusted to keep their promises.

He is ten years old, and he is learning that the generation before him recognised the crisis, they had the science, and chose to act.

He does not yet fully understand the transformation that made this possible. But he will. And when he does, that knowledge will be a gift he carries: the understanding that courage and collective action can shape better futures.

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