Adapting to climate change
The previous post addressed the topic of sea level rise with a focus on a single area of southwest England. This post looks at a wider range of climate adaptation issues which may affect all the UK.
Greenpeace (2024)
lists present-day effects of climate change such as
heatwaves, flooding, wildfires, spells of unusually cold weather, sea level
rise and coastal erosion, loss of species’ habitats and threats of extinction. It
predicts that future floods in the UK “could impact two or three million people
across the country if temperatures reach 2°C or 3°C above pre-industrial levels”, and
notes that despite this, “thousands of new homes are still being built within
high-risk flood zones, and thousands of flood defences are in poor condition.”
A detailed
approach to climate change adaptation is provided by Hodgkin and Rutter (2024),
who begin with climate change as an existing problem for the world, citing wildfires
in Canada, flooding in Libya, and drought which reduced shipping in the Panama Canal. To the
problems listed by Greenpeace they add migration flows, endangered food
security and thermally inadequate buildings. Their main concern however is for
the UK, and they consider that “successive governments have failed to prepare
the UK to adapt effectively.” Substantial increases in heat-related deaths can
be expected in the absence of improved ventilation and passive cooling for
buildings; and dengue fever and West Nile virus could become transmissible in
areas including London. Power system and railway infrastructure will need to be upgraded to cope with
future weather extremes; increased flood protection will be needed, and “difficult
decisions will have to be made in coastal areas about whether to fund costly
flood barriers or relocate communities.” Since the UK imports much of its food,
it may be necessary to “create more resilient food supply chains” perhaps by
supporting domestic food production.
The authors
point out that adaptation “requires significant investment, but failing to
adapt will cost far more”. The impact of several risks identified by the
Climate Change Committee (CCC, 2021) could each exceed
£1 billion per year, and the government’s third National
Adaptation Programme (NAP3, 2024) “estimates that the impacts of climate
change could cost England’s economy between 1% and 1.5%
of GDP by 2045”. Statista (2024) estimated the GDP of the UK in 2023 as
approximately £ 2.274
trillion, so that 1% of present GDP is about £23 billion. Hodgkin and Rutter cite
estimates of required annual expenditure in the next decade as £1bn on flood
protection, £0.7bn on the public water system, £1bn on housing retrofit, £3bn on
nature restoration, which together with other adaptation investment might total
£10bn p.a. Early adaptation actions were viewed as having cost-benefit ratios
in the range of approximately 2:1 to 10:1.
Government
initiatives are reviewed in areas such as infrastructure regulation, updating
building regulations, local nature recovery strategies, and updates to the
National Planning Policy Framework, and budget allocations are cited for
schemes such as flood and coastal protection, water quality and resilient
supply. However, the Climate Change Committee’s 2023 report on adaptation
progress found “very limited evidence of the implementation of adaptation at
the scale needed to fully prepare for climate risks facing the UK” (CCC, 2023).
The National Adaptation Programme 3 was described by Baroness Brown, chair of
the CCC’s adaptation sub-committee, as failing to set out a clear vision for
what a well-adapted UK would look like, as having very few new high-value
initiatives and as lacking ambition.
Defra – the Department
for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs - leads climate adaptation in the UK,
but some related areas are the responsibility of other departments: for
example, climate change mitigation is now the responsibility of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero – DESNZ. The
Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is involved, and the Cabinet
Office leads on risk and resilience in general through the resilience
directorate. There is no specific committee on adaptation, and “the Treasury is
the ultimate arbiter of departments’ spending.”
Hodgkin and
Rutter clearly feel that the UK government could learn from the ways in which
other countries approach climate adaptation, and they present five short case
studies – from the Netherlands, the US, Canada, Australia and Ireland, along
with a local government plan from a UK city, Manchester. They state that “there
is no single reason why adaptation is so neglected” but cite short-termism and “lack
of interest in prevention” as characteristic of the UK government’s approach to
public spending. The “tightness of the fiscal situation makes it harder for
politicians to justify spending to protect against future risks at the expense
of current services” and adaptation “lacks the political resonance of emissions
reduction in general and net zero in particular.” Further, “there is no
powerful lobby for adaptation and plenty of people with a vested interest in
ignoring it” such as those developers who see the short-term advantages of building
on flood plains; also, the economics of adaptation “is less well researched and
less well evidenced than on mitigation”.
The paper
next asks what government could do better and approaches the question from two,
non-exclusive, perspectives: the place of adaptation in government; and how it
“can be embedded more strongly into cross-government processes”. It proposes that
the place of adaptation could be improved by making the Department for Energy
Security and Net Zero a department for both climate change mitigation and
adaptation; making adaptation a core task of the Cabinet Office resilience directorate;
giving the Treasury the lead on adaptation and climate resilience; enhancing
the role of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities – and,
through it, local government; and leaving responsibility in Defra but looking
at “ways of giving it more cross-government clout”.
There follow
discussions of the case for a cross-cutting adaptation minister and a joint
unit to support adaptation; the reasons for embedding adaptation and resilience
in core financial control mechanisms; the place of adaptation as a
cross-cutting theme in the next spending review; the importance of taking adaptation
into account when designing regulations; the need for auditable metrics of risk
reduction in future adaptation plans; and the need for proper Parliamentary
scrutiny of departmental activity on adaptation.
The
concluding paragraphs are quoted below in full:
“Reaching
net zero looks set to remain a preoccupation of governments, with big
cross-government efforts pursued to transform the economy to achieve it. But
however successful and rapid that change is, in the near to medium term climate
change will increasingly affect day-to-day life, disrupting livelihoods and
imposing costs on the economy and society. This is where adaptation comes in.
Governments
have been promising to take adaptation seriously for years. In the immediate
aftermath of floods or heatwaves there is often a renewed impetus to take
action, and new investment. But consistent planning and policy have been
lacking, harming adaptation efforts.
Climate
change impacts should no longer be regarded as a possible future contingency
but as a near inevitability that needs to be factored into all future plans.
Our research suggests the quickest way to move adaptation up the agenda would
be for the Treasury to build it into its core financial mechanisms – to
recognise that future spend that does not take adequate account of future
climate change is quite simply poor value for money”.
References
CCC, 2021, Monetary Valuation of
Risks and Opportunities in CCRA3, Paul Watkiss Associates, online, accessed
20th August 2024
CCC, 2023, Progress in adapting to
climate change – 2023 Report to Parliament, Climate Change Committee, online,
accessed 22nd August 2024
Greenpeace, 2024, How will climate
change affect the UK? online, accessed 20th
August 2024
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/climate-change/how-will-climate-change-affect-the-uk/
Hodgkin, R. and
Rutter, J. (2024), Adapting to climate change, Institute for Government, online,
accessed 20th August 2024
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-03/adapting-to-climate-change.pdf
NAP3 (2024),
Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3), DEFRA, online,
accessed 20th August 2024
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/third-national-adaptation-programme-nap3
Statista
(2024), UK GDP - Statistics & Facts, online, accessed 20th August 2024,
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