Incorporating climate change into water resources planning in England and Wales

Public water supplies in England and Wales are provided by around 25 private-sector companies, regulated by an economic regulator (Ofwat) and and environmental regulator (Environment Agency). As part of the regulatory process, companies are required periodically to review their investment needs to maintain safe and secure supplies, and this involves an assessment of the future balance between water supply and demand. The water industry and regulators have developed an agreed set of procedures for this assessment. Climate change has been incorporated into these procedures since the late 1990s, although has been included increasingly seriously over time and it has been an effective legal requirement to consider climate change since the 2003 Water Act. In the most recent assessment in 2009, companies were required explicitly to plan for a defined amount of climate change, taking into account climate change uncertainty. A “medium” climate change scenario was defined, together with “wet” and “dry” extremes, based on scenarios developed from a number of climate models. The water industry and its regulators are now gearing up to exploit the new UKCP09 probabilistic climate change projections – but these pose significant practical and conceptual challenges. This paper outlines how the procedures for incorporating climate change information into water resources planning have evolved, and explores the issues currently facing the industry in adapting to climate change.

Resilience planning, economic change and the politics of post-recession development in London and Hong Kong

For much of the 1990s and 2000s, the emphasis of urban policy in many global cities was on managing and mitigating the social and environmental effects of rapid economic growth. The credit crunch of 2008 and the subsequent recession have undermined some of the core assumptions on which such policies were based. It is in this context that the concept of resilience planning has taken on a new significance. Drawing on contemporary research in London and Hong Kong, the paper shows how resilience and recovery planning has become a key area of political debate. It examines what is meant by conservative and radical interpretations of resilience and how conservative views have come to dominate ‘recovery’ thinking, with élite groups unwilling to accept the limits to the neo-liberal orthodoxies that helped to precipitate the economic crisis. The paper explores the implications of such thinking for the politics of urban development.

Anticipatory objects and uncertain imminence: cattle grids, landscape and the presencing of climate change on the Lizard Peninsula, UK

In this paper we show how a seemingly unremarkable object – a cattle grid – has come to presence climate change in partial and contingent ways on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, UK. We identify the cattle grid as an ‘anticipatory object’ through which conservation organisations seek to manage the future and adapt to climate change, but which at the same time presences that unthought-of future for others in the landscape. We explore the ways in which the cattle grid acts to presence something that is not only absent – climate change – but has uncertain imminence. We investigate the ways in which the cattle grid make climate relevant as an embodied and experiential process, a physical and intellectual artefact, and the means to imagine climate and the ways it might change. Drawing upon interpretative approaches informed by theorisations of materiality, presence and absence to understand climate change as a social phenomenon, we go beyond a consideration of this ordinary object defined by its function to consider how the object is experienced, the processes and practices through which people relate to it, and the ways in which social meaning accumulates around it. The empirical basis for this argument is provided by in-depth interviews with local representatives of Natural England, residents and farmers.

Reform of the planning system in Northern Ireland: your chance to influence change

Consultation on the Reform of the Planning System in Northern Ireland commenced on 6 July 2009 with the publication of the long awaited proposals paper: 'Reform of the Planning System in Northern Ireland: Your chance to influence change'. A 12 week consultation period followed during which time a series of consultation roadshow events were undertaken. This report is an account of that strand of the reform consultation and the discussions that took place at the roadshows during a three week period in September 2009. The roadshow events formed the central part in a process of encouraging engagement and response to the Reform Proposals before the closing date of 2 October 2009. They were organised and facilitated by a team of event managers and independent planners who, together with key Planning Service personnel, attended a mixture of day and evening events in each of the new eleven council areas to hear the views and opinions of those who came along. Aside from being publicly advertised, over 1,500 invitations (written and e-invites) were issued to a wide range of sectors, including the business community,environmentalists, councils, community and voluntary groups and other organisations, and 1,000 fliers were issued to libraries, leisure centres, council offices and civic centres. In total almost 500 people took up the invitation and came along to one or more of the events.

A decision framework for considering climate change adaptation in biodiversity conservation planning

General principles of climate change adaptation for biodiversity have been formulated, but do not help prioritize actions. This is inhibiting their integration into conservation planning. We address this need with a decision framework that identifies and prioritizes actions to increase the adaptive capacity of species. The framework classifies species according to their current distribution and projected future climate space, as a basis for selecting appropriate decision trees. Decisions rely primarily on expert opinion, with additional information from quantitative models, where data are available. The framework considers in-situ management, followed by interventions at the landscape scale and finally translocation or ex-situ conservation. Synthesis and applications: From eight case studies, the key interventions identified for integrating climate change adaptation into conservation planning were local management and expansion of sites. We anticipate that, in combination with consideration of socio-economic and local factors, the decision framework will be a useful tool for conservation and natural resource managers to integrate adaptation measures into conservation plans.

Participatory urban planning for climate change adaptation in coastal cities: lessons from a pilot experience in Maputo, Mozambique

This paper proposes a rights-based approach for participatory urban planning for climate change adaptation in urban areas. Participatory urban planning ties climate change adaptation to local development opportunities. Previous discussions suggest that participatory urban planning may help to understand structural inequalities, to gain, even if temporally, institutional support and to deliver a planning process in constant negotiation with local actors. Building upon an action research project which implemented a process of participatory urban planning for climate change in Maputo, Mozambique, this paper reflects upon the practical lessons that emerged from these experiences, in relation to the incorporation of climate change information, the difficulties to secure continued support from local governments and the opportunities for local impacts through the implementation of the proposals emerging from this process.

Adapting to climate change impacts on water resources in England - an assessment of draft Water Resources Management Plans

Climate change is expected to produce reductions in water availability in England, potentially necessitating adaptive action by the water industry to maintain supplies. As part of Ofwat's fifth Periodic Review (PR09), water companies recently released their draft Water Resources Management Plans, setting out how each company intends to maintain the balance between the supply and demand for water over the next 25 years, following Environment Agency guidelines. This paper reviews these plans to determine company estimates of the impact of climate change on water supply relative to other resource pressures. The approaches adopted for incorporating the impact in the plans and the proposed management solutions are also identified. Climate change impacts for individual resource zones range from no reductions in deployable output to greater than 50% over the planning period. The estimated national aggregated loss of deployable output under a “core” climate scenario is ~520 Ml/d (3% of deployable output) by 2034/35, the equivalent of the supply of one entire water company (South West Water). Climate change is the largest single driver of change in water supplies over the planning period. Over half of the climate change impact is concentrated in southern England. In extreme cases, climate change uncertainty is of the same magnitude as the change under the core scenario (up to a loss of ~475 Ml/d). 44 of the 68 resource zones with available data are estimated to have a climate change impact. In 35 of these climate change has the greatest impact although in 10 zones sustainability reductions have a greater impact. Of the overall change in downward pressure on the supply-demand balance over the planning period, ~56% is accounted for by increased demand (620 Ml/d) and supply side climate change accounts for ~37% (407 Ml/d). Climate change impacts have a cumulative impact in concert with other changing supply side reducing components increasing the national pressure on the supply-demand balance. Whilst the magnitude of climate change appears to justify its explicit consideration, it is rare that adaptation options are planned solely in response to climate change but as a suite of options to provide a resilient supply to a range of pressures (including significant demand side pressures). Supply-side measures still tend to be considered by water companies to be more reliable than demand-side measures.

Observed adaptation to climate change: UK evidence of transition to a well-adapting society

This paper investigates whether and to what extent a wide range of actors in the UK are adapting to climate change, and whether this is evidence of a social transition. We document evidence of over 300 examples of early adopters of adaptation practice to climate change in the UK. These examples span a range of activities from small adjustments (or coping) to building adaptive capacity, implementing actions and creating deeper systemic change in public and private organisations in a range of sectors. We find that adaptation in the UK has been dominated by government initiatives and has principally occurred in the form of research into climate change impacts. These actions within government stimulate a further set of actions at other scales in public agencies, regulatory agencies and regional government (or in the devolved administrations), though with little real evidence of climate change adaptation initiatives trickling down to local government level. The water supply and flood defence sectors, requiring significant investment in large scale infrastructure such as reservoirs and coastal defences, have invested more heavily in identifying potential impacts and adaptations. Economic sectors that are not dependent on large scale infrastructure appear to be investing far less effort and resources in preparing for climate change. We conclude that while the government-driven top-down targeted adaptation approach has generated anticipatory action at low cost, it may also have created enough niche activities to allow for diffusion of new adaptation practices in response to real or perceived climate change. These results have significant implications for how climate policy can be developed to support autonomous adaptors in the UK and other countries.

A review of climate risk information for adaptation and development planning

Although the use of climate scenarios for impact assessment has grown steadily since the 1990s, uptake of such information for adaptation is lagging by nearly a decade in terms of scientific output. Nonetheless, integration of climate risk information in development planning is now a priority for donor agencies because of the need to prepare for climate change impacts across different sectors and countries. This urgency stems from concerns that progress made against Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) could be threatened by anthropogenic climate change beyond 2015. Up to this time the human signal, though detectable and growing, will be a relatively small component of climate variability and change. This implies the need for a twin-track approach: on the one hand, vulnerability assessments of social and economic strategies for coping with present climate extremes and variability, and, on the other hand, development of climate forecast tools and scenarios to evaluate sector-specific, incremental changes in risk over the next few decades. This review starts by describing the climate outlook for the next couple of decades and the implications for adaptation assessments. We then review ways in which climate risk information is already being used in adaptation assessments and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of three groups of techniques. Next we identify knowledge gaps and opportunities for improving the production and uptake of climate risk information for the 2020s. We assert that climate change scenarios can meet some, but not all, of the needs of adaptation planning. Even then, the choice of scenario technique must be matched to the intended application, taking into account local constraints of time, resources, human capacity and supporting infrastructure. We also show that much greater attention should be given to improving and critiquing models used for climate impact assessment, as standard practice. Finally, we highlight the over-arching need for the scientific community to provide more information and guidance on adapting to the risks of climate variability and change over nearer time horizons (i.e. the 2020s). Although the focus of the review is on information provision and uptake in developing regions, it is clear that many developed countries are facing the same challenges. Copyright © 2009 Royal Meteorological Society

Projections of when temperature change will exceed 2°C above pre-industrial levels

Climate change projections are usually presented as 'snapshots' of change at a particular time in the future. Instead, we consider the key question 'when will specific temperature thresholds will be exceeded?'. Framing the question as "when might something happen (either permanently or temporarily)?" rather than "what might happen?" demonstrates that lowering future emissions will delay the crossing of temperature thresholds and buy valuable time for planning adaptation. For example, in higher greenhouse gas emission scenarios, a global average 2°C warming threshold is likely to be crossed by 2060, whereas in a lower emissions scenario, the crossing of this threshold is delayed up to several decades. On regional scales, however, the 2°C threshold will probably be exceeded over large parts of Eurasia, North Africa and Canada by 2040 if emissions continue to increase- well within the lifetime of many people living now.