Wildfires and floods cost emergency services £11m

Firefighters are having to tackle large fires like this at Beam Park, Dagenham

London's emergency services have spent more than £11m responding to wildfires and flooding since 2018, prompting calls for more investment in climate change resilience.

The capital has seen 808 wildfires rage in the last seven years, which cost the London Fire Brigade (LFB) more than £5.4m to respond to, according to figures from the mayor of London.

This year alone, there have been 21 wildfire incidents, prompting the LFB to deploy 4,022 personnel in response and costing £766,000, City Hall said.

Meanwhile, the cost of tackling floods since 2018 reached £5.8m this year, including £557,000 for 195 incidents in 2025, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

'Increasing risk'

Leonie Cooper, Labour's environment spokesperson on the London Assembly, said: "This is not a warning of what climate change might do, this is what it is doing to London today."

This summer London faced four heatwaves, with Met Office statistics confirming summer 2025 as officially the UK's hottest on record.

Figures show that since 2018, Havering has seen the most wildfires, with 158 taking place in the borough. This includes the Wennington blaze of 2022, which saw more than a dozen houses destroyed.

The local authority has seen 37 incidents this year, compared with eight in 2018.

Firefighters are increasingly having to tackle blazes like this one at Rainham

Flooding has also increasingly affected the capital, with the Greater London Authority (GLA) branding flash flooding as the main environmental risk to residents.

City Hall analysis found that floods could affect almost half of London's hospitals and a fifth of schools.

Assistant Commissioner for LFB's operational resilience and control, Pat Goulbourne, said: "We know that climate change is having an impact on London's weather, including increasing the risk of wildfires and flash flooding."

He called for landowners to take preventative steps such as the creation of fire breaks.

He added: "It is also important that there is continued investment to ensure we have the necessary tools available to address the challenges that lie ahead."

The Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, is attending the C40 World Mayors Summit this week, an event showcasing how cities are tackling the climate crisis - held ahead of Cop30 being staged by Brazil in the Amazonian city of Belem.