The search has a climate change rating — what am I supposed to do with it?

The environmental search includes a climate change rating

It is a projection, and it is the only part of a conveyancing search that is about the future rather than the present. Climate assessments model how the physical risks to a property — flooding, subsidence, coastal erosion — are expected to change over decades. That makes them genuinely useful for a thirty-year commitment and genuinely uncertain, and both halves of that matter.

From the e-ROT archive

This scenario is drawn from Report on Title material dealing with this specific circumstance.

Lexsure master Report on Title paragraph: Climate Change Index Rating · See the wording

What it actually assesses

Not just flooding. A climate assessment looks at the physical effects expected from long-term changes in temperature, rainfall, humidity and wind — increased flooding, increased subsidence, increased coastal erosion, and other effects on land and buildings.

Subsidence is the one most often missed and the one with the clearest insurance consequence. Clay soils that shrink in prolonged dry weather are a well-understood mechanism, and a property on clay with trees nearby is a known pattern rather than a speculation.

Why it has a shelf life

Climate models are revised as the science and the data improve, so an assessment is a snapshot of what was projected when it was run. The Lexsure wording below recommends a fresh climate search after ten years, or sooner if significant changes to the property are proposed — which is a sensible rule and an unusual admission to find in a search report.

The practical reading: treat the rating as current best information rather than as a settled fact, and do not assume a reassuring result stays reassuring for the length of a mortgage.

The one thing it should change

How you think about insurance over time. A property that is insurable today at an ordinary premium can become expensive to insure if the underlying risk rises, and that affects both your cost of ownership and what a future buyer can do.

It is a reason to ask your insurer about the longer term as well as the renewal, and to take a rating that flags rising risk as a question about the next twenty years rather than the next twelve months.

Your conveyancer will not interpret the rating for you and will say so. That is not evasion: reading a climate model is not a legal skill, and the report itself will name what it is based on.

Climate Change Index Rating

Master precedent Lexsure e-ROTScope Forward-looking assessmentWord count 120Status Current master paragraph

The environmental search includes a climate search to assess it for certain future physical impacts of climate change. Climate change means the long-term and material changes in global or regional weather patterns including, temperature, humidity, precipitation, or wind which is predicted by the Met Office, British Geological Survey and other climate specialists to bring about increased flooding, increased subsidence, increased coastal erosion and other physical impacts to land and buildings. Please review the environmental search and its recommendations.

As climate models are continually evolving we recommend carrying out a new climate search in 10 years or when a significant change in the property is proposed, whichever is sooner. We are not qualified to advise any further on this search result.

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