Published by Envisionation Ltd | February 2026
If it feels as though the rain simply has not stopped since Christmas, that is because, for millions of people across the UK, it genuinely has not. The opening weeks of 2026 have delivered some of the most persistently wet weather in living memory.
Cornwall recorded its wettest January ever. Northern Ireland saw its wettest January in 149 years. A staggering 26 weather stations across the UK set new monthly rainfall records in January alone. North Wyke in Devon and Cardinham in Cornwall each endured 50 consecutive days of measurable rainfall. Running from New Year’s Eve straight through to early February without a single dry day. By early February, England had already exceeded its entire average winter rainfall total for the season.
This is not merely a miserable winter. It is a warning signal, one we need to understand, and one we urgently need to act upon.
So Why Has It Been So Wet?
To understand what is happening overhead, we need to look up. Roughly 10 kilometres above our heads, to a powerful ribbon of fast-moving air called the jet stream. Think of it as the atmosphere’s great conveyor belt, steering weather systems in from the Atlantic towards the British Isles.
In a typical British winter, this band of air arcs northwards past Iceland and Scotland, meaning Atlantic storms often clip us and then push further north. This winter has been very different. The jet stream has been sitting unusually far south, funnelling a relentless procession of low-pressure systems directly at the UK. Making matters considerably worse, a stubborn block of high pressure has been anchored over Scandinavia, acting effectively as a door that simply will not open.
Normally, a weather system rolls in from the west, drops its rain, and pushes eastwards. This winter, those systems have been stalling. Piling up against the Scandinavian block, dumping their moisture over already-saturated ground, and repeating the cycle again and again. The result has felt, as the Met Office put it, like winter being ‘stuck on repeat’.
“The combination of a powerful jet stream, a southward-shifted storm track, and a blocking pattern over Europe created the perfect setup for a notably wet winter in 2026.” Met Office, February 2026
Is This Just Bad Luck?
Here is where it becomes critically important. While the specific atmospheric setup of this winter involved a particular convergence of factors, the type of extreme and persistent weather we have been experiencing is precisely what climate scientists have been warning us to expect more frequently.
As global temperatures rise, the atmosphere holds more moisture — approximately 7% more for every single degree Celsius of warming. When it rains, it rains harder. The extremes become more extreme. Scientists at the University of Reading noted that 2025 was one of the sunniest and driest years on record, only to have communities barely weeks into the new year wade through floodwater. This violent swinging between extremes, what researchers are now calling ‘weather whiplash’, is the hallmark of a destabilised climate system.
And critically, this is not just a British story. Between 1 January and 19 February 2026 alone, the Envisionation Global Extreme Weather Snapshot recorded simultaneous damaging events across Portugal, Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, Italy, the Balearic Islands, Morocco, Mozambique, Madagascar, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Japan, Russia’s Far East, India, Pakistan, and Australia. Many regions were hit more than once, with insufficient recovery time between events.
The defining feature of early 2026 is not any single catastrophe. It is concurrency; multiple regions suffering simultaneously, overwhelming response capacity, compounding losses, and accelerating pressure on insurance, public budgets, and infrastructure in ways that are already costing tens of billions of euros annually.
The Missing Piece: The Living World
There is a deeper truth that rarely makes it into mainstream headlines, and it is the one that matters most: the climate system is not broken solely by carbon emissions. It is broken by the wholesale destruction of the living world itself.
Every forest felled, every wetland drained, every grassland stripped to bare soil represents the loss of something extraordinarily powerful: living biomass. Trees, plants, soils, and the vast webs of life they support do not simply store carbon. They actively regulate moisture, temperature, and weather patterns across entire continents and ocean systems.
Healthy forests breathe water vapour into the atmosphere, creating what scientists call ‘flying rivers’ — invisible aerial streams of moisture that distribute rainfall across thousands of kilometres. Healthy soils absorb and slowly release water, acting as natural sponges that reduce flash flooding and sustain river flows during droughts. Wetlands buffer storm systems. Root networks stabilise the ground and maintain the hydrological cycles that govern our weather.
When we remove this biomass at the scale humanity has done over the past two centuries, we do not simply release carbon. We dismantle the planet’s own thermostat and hydrological management system. The jet stream’s erratic behaviour, the persistent blocking patterns, and the intensity and frequency of our rainfall. These are symptoms of a planet whose living systems are profoundly out of balance.
The climate cannot stabilise until the biosphere is restored. Carbon targets alone are not enough. We must rebuild the living world.
There Is a Clear Path Forward
This is precisely why the Envisionation Biosphere Restoration Plan exists. It begins with an unflinching recognition: reducing emissions, while essential, is insufficient on its own. We must also actively restore the living biomass of the planet at scale: rewilding degraded land, reforesting critical regions, restoring coastal and inland wetlands, regenerating our soils, and rebuilding the biodiversity that underpins atmospheric and hydrological stability.
The Plan calls for whole Earth system modelling to be treated as critical national infrastructure — because better forecasting and accountability are the foundation of smarter investment. It calls for whole Earth system accounting so that the true costs of environmental destruction are visible in finance and policy, ending the invisible subsidy of ecological damage. And it calls for capital to be mobilised into verified, measurable recovery. Through frameworks such as Empathy Economics and Empathy Coin, which align financial incentives with genuine biosphere outcomes.
None of this is idealism. It is atmospheric physics and ecological science translated into an actionable agenda. Restore the biosphere, and you restore the planet’s capacity to regulate itself. The rain will still come, it always will in the British Isles, but it will come as part of a balanced, functioning Earth system rather than as a record-breaking deluge driven by a world that is increasingly out of equilibrium.
The Time to Act Is Now
Early 2026 has made one thing impossible to ignore: extreme weather is no longer a future risk to be managed. It is a present reality, arriving simultaneously across multiple continents, compounding faster than communities and governments can absorb. Mainstream media, including much of UK television news, is still reporting individual events rather than the extraordinary cumulative pattern, and that gap in public understanding is itself a risk.
The Envisionation Biosphere Restoration Plan provides the solution structure the world needs. The evidence is now undeniable. The question is whether leaders, institutions, and investors will match the urgency of the moment.
Find out more about the Envisionation Biosphere Restoration Plan.
© Envisionation Ltd 2026. All rights reserved. Sources: Met Office (January & February 2026 data); Envisionation Global Extreme Weather Snapshot v4 (1 Jan – 19 Feb 2026); University of Reading Atmospheric Observatory; Reuters; UN OCHA; World Weather Attribution.
