Precariously Prepared? British Communities Must Confront Their Tempestuous Futures in 2026

If the previous decade permitted us at safe distance to pontificate about Polycrisis, 2026 is the junctural year for communities to recognise their need to act. Risks are mounting, their potential impacts are becoming more severe.

US users of social media sounded alarms concerning the prospect of a global recession all throughout 2025, particularly over Trump’s trade tariffs and an alleged AI stock market bubble. Neither prediction has definitively occurred (yet), but the claims evidence real fears. Current levels of economic interconnection guarantee disruptive financial contagion, including from the shadow banking industry, currently over-leveraged, opaque, and unregulated. 

Another contagion of concern are diseases. Since the prolonged national level “lockdowns” in 2020, countries are actually less resourced to handle pandemics now. Defunding of the WHO amongst other UN agencies has fomented conditions for a less coordinated and orderly response at the international level. Governments seemingly ignoring lessons from COVID and the widespread disinformation around vaccinations, lockdowns, or disease transmission are blaring omens. 

In the UK, extreme weather conditions caused by climatic changes cannot be ignored, as the effects of surface water and fluvial flooding occur on doorsteps and across entire communities. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the drought conditions taking hold.  

Our general awareness of these risks is sufficient by now, but communities are not yet adequately prepared. Most British people either hold low amounts of cash savings, or no savings at all, which leaves them in vulnerable positions in a case they lose their livelihood or see their standard of living decline. 

Citizens would hope to rely on local and central government, or indeed the voluntary and community sector (VCS) to help them. Unfortunately, capital and resource departmental expenditure limits are decreasing in real terms over the long term, and VCS organisations see large cuts to grants and statutory contracts every year. 

Local governments increasingly find their budgets eaten up by social care, and central departments must now prioritise their functions in ways which leave citizens in limbo states, such as the Environment Agency and Flood Defences. 

If individuals cannot weather risks alone, nor can they rely on the services they fund through donations and taxes, they can turn to their communities. Manchester University’s Consortium for Societal Resilience has outlined a guide for the “Community Emergency Hub”, which envisages locals building a low-cost, grassroot hub to solve local emergencies where their capacities can handle them. 

It is an intriguing document, but as the name suggests, these hubs are designed for responses to emergencies. In 2026, prevention and mitigation measures still can reduce or even eliminate risk impacts. With adaptation, such hubs could become focal points for constructing and administrating Community Early Warning Systems, or indeed stockpiling supplies, or providing detailed and actionable advice on low-cost auxiliary measures for critical infrastructure. 

This is all easier said than done; communities are beset by barriers. Members of communities may not have stable living or employment conditions, nor rooted social connection or good health. The effects of those situations can leave community members isolated, unsure where or how to start. 

A community “vanguard” - jointly committed to outlining ‘the how’ of crisis preparation, and to beginning with baby steps immediately - would assuage many of these concerns. The strategic vision should be to create a decentralised, autonomous, well-connected network of such hubs across UK regions.   

Threats posed by malign actors truncate the timeline from acknowledgement of risk to actual impact. Threats include cyberattacks, widescale disinformation campaigns, mass deportations, censorship of media and activists, external radicalisation of groups inside the state and as of this week, military intervention. 

Communities must recognise these threats also require them to begin now in constructing hubs, and to implement means of deterrence, detection, delaying, and responding to threats affecting them locally. Hubs could run media literacy and counter-radicalisation workshops, particularly for young men, for example, and providing resources or advice to community members on deterrence and reporting threats. 

Luke Kemp has written that “collapse” is often portrayed as dramatic and catastrophic for elites, this has not been the case for everyday communities historically. He notes that the communities who are the best socially connected tend to survive and thrive, even compared to an individual who is well prepared, materially. 

Political journalism regularly sensationalises events. Despite talk of collapse or Polycrisis, the intention of this piece is to avoid such melodrama. Instead, readers should be aware of the trajectory their everyday communities find themselves facing in 2026, and consider themselves armed with a practical direction in which they can do something about it.

Image: Flickr/No 10 Downing Street (Andrew Parsons)

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