Future city dwellers could beat the heat with clothes made of a new fabric that keeps them cool.

The textile, made of a plastic material and silver nanowires, is designed to stay cool in urban settings by taking advantage of a principle known as radiative cooling – the natural process by which objects radiate heat into space.

The material selectively emits infrared radiation within the narrow band of wavelengths that can escape Earth’s atmosphere. At the same time, it blocks the sun’s radiation and infrared radiation emitted by surrounding structures.

at the University of Chicago in Illinois and his team designed this material to “try to block more than half of [the radiation] from the buildings and the ground”, he says.

Some cooling fabrics and building materials already rely on this radiative cooling principle, but most of those designs do not account for radiation from the sun or infrared radiation from structures like buildings and pavement. They also assume the material would be oriented horizontally to the sky like panels on a rooftop, rather than the vertical orientation of material in clothes worn by a person.

Those designs work well “when you are facing a cooler object such as the sky or an open field”, says Hsu. “However, that’s rarely the case when you are facing an urban heat island.”

Hsu and his colleagues designed a three-layer textile. The inner layer is made of a common clothing fabric like wool or cotton, and the middle layer consists of silver nanowires that reflect most radiation.

The top layer is made of a plastic material called polymethylpentene, which doesn’t absorb or reflect most wavelengths, but emits a narrow band of infrared radiation.

In outdoor tests, the textile stayed 8.9°C (16°F) cooler than a regular silk fabric and 2.3°C (4.1°F) cooler than a material that emitted radiation across a broad range. When tested on skin, the textile was 1.8°C (3.2°F) cooler than a cotton fabric.

Hsu says this small difference in temperature could theoretically increase the time someone could comfortably be exposed to heat by up to a third, although this hasn’t yet been tested.

“Making this stuff practical as a textile is always difficult,” says at the University of California, Los Angeles, adding the work is a good demonstration of translating the physical principle of radiative cooling to a usable material. Other materials with similar properties could also be used on the vertical surfaces of buildings, he says.

In the face of climate change, mountain plants in western North America are expanding into higher, cooler elevations faster than previously thought. But in some regions, the climbing isn’t keeping up with rising temperatures.

As climate change ratchets up global temperature, plants and animals that have evolved to live within a specific set of environmental conditions are forced to quickly adjust to the new normal. One way for species to beat the heat is to move higher in elevation, where cooler conditions persist in the thinner atmosphere. Ecologists already knew that species respond to changes in their environment, says at Brown University in Rhode Island. “The question is, to what degree? And are they able to keep up?”

To learn more about the rate of vegetation shift, Kellner and his colleagues compared NASA Landsat satellite images of nine mountain ranges in western North America between 1984 and 2011.

“We’re talking about an absolutely enormous region of the world here, all the way from southern Mexico to the Canadian Rockies,” says Kellner.

When the researchers looked at the mountain slopes’ peak “greenness” – a measure of vegetation cover during the height of the growing season – they found a rapid shift: plants were moving an average of 67 metres higher per decade – more than four times faster than previously reported. In New Mexico, where vegetation was moving fastest, plants climbed over 112 metres per decade.

Warming isn’t the only reason vegetation might move upslope. Changes in precipitation patterns, or ecological disturbances like farming, grazing livestock and fire could also be responsible for the skyward shift. But Kellner says finding this pattern across different mountain ranges suggests one common factor: rising temperatures.

“It’s pretty hard to think about any explanation for this [pattern] other than something that is operating consistently across nine mountain ranges between Mexico and Canada,” says Kellner. Climate change has also impacted the amount and timing of precipitation in some ranges, but the pattern hasn’t been steady across all regions.

Some plants’ rapid climbing may still not be fast enough. When the team compared the measured speed of the upslope shift across five mountain ranges in the US with what would be predicted by recent warming, only plants in two ranges – in New Mexico and the Sierra Nevada – kept pace with climate change.

“If species are being pushed outside of the range in which they can have a viable, sustainable population,” says Kellner, “then we could be in a situation where we’re going to lose them.”

The nearly three-decade time span and geographic range analysed are major strengths of the study, says at the University of Basel in Switzerland. But because the study looks at vegetation cover overall, Basel says the findings can’t tell us what is happening with individual plant species.

“The problem is species shift so differently [from one another] – there is huge variation.” She says the findings are a “wake-up call that species are already on the move”.

The UK government has been warned that its failure to adapt to deadly temperatures, extreme flooding and other effects of climate change is endangering the country’s goal of reducing emissions to net zero by 2050.

Climate impacts are already testing the UK’s resilience to a warmer world, such as a six-day heatwave last August that was linked to hundreds of deaths. But the UK government’s statutory advisers on climate change say the country’s response has been inadequate and frustrating.

“Overall, the level of risk that we are facing from climate change has increased since five years ago,” says at the Climate Change Committee (CCC), an independent public body that advises the UK government and parliament. “Our preparations are not keeping pace with the risks that we face. That is a very concerning conclusion.”

In as part of the UK’s third climate change risk assessment, the CCC says warmer and wetter winters and hotter and drier summers are already posing a risk to people, nature and the economy after only 1°C of climate change globally. Without further adaptation, heat-related deaths in the UK could more than triple as temperatures rise, from about 2000 a year now to around 7000 by 2050. Other risks facing the UK include an increase in wildfires and landslides.

The CCC is damning about the UK government’s failure to act in recent years, citing examples such as the 570,000 homes built in the past five years that aren’t resilient to future heat. “We are frustrated. Some of these issues, like overheating in buildings, we’ve been raising consistently for over a decade,” says Stark.

at the CCC says that after the , the ensuing from the government was inadequate. “It didn’t address many of the risks highlighted in the risk assessment and it wasn’t action-focused, it was very much process. The time for action was some time ago, but it’s now getting really urgent.”

Today’s report makes clear that even with only 2°C of global warming, the upper limit of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the UK faces greater climate impacts. In a world with 2°C of warming, the number of very high-damage risks from climate change will increase from four now to 14 in the 2080s, costing at least tens of billions of pounds per year.

Too much government planning assumes that the world will only warm by 2°C, says Stark. “We would say that is an optimistic outcome for a global temperature rise.” Warming of more than 2°C would require spending much more money on flood defences, cooling measures such as shades on buildings, and more.

Failure to adapt will imperil the UK’s net zero target, according to the CCC. “We cannot deliver net zero without adaptation,” says King. She says the main reason why is that the UK is relying on nature-based solutions, from planting trees to restoring peatlands, to remove CO2 emissions by 2050, which would be undermined by a lack of adaptation.

Another risk to the net zero goal is that, in the coming years, the UK will have a much bigger power sector and be much more reliant on it. Climate change risks to power stations and pylons range from flooding to lightning strikes, such as the

A spokesperson for the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs didn’t comment on the alleged failings on adaptation, but said the department welcomed the report and “will consider its recommendations closely”.

Sign up to our free Fix the Planet newsletter to get a dose of climate optimism delivered straight to your inbox, every Thursday