The Climate Change Committee’s Devastating Verdict On The State Of Britain’s Climate.
The recent Climate Change Committee report on the UK government’s lack of preparedness for climate breakdown reveals negligence at a historic scale.
The report lays bare years of successive Governments’ failure to prepare the UK for the breakdown that is now upon us, with far worse to come.
From heat exposure to rising flood risk to national infrastructure, homes and harvests, countless lives and livelihoods are at severe risk. Conservative estimates project impact to the UK economy into hundreds of billions, before 2050.
Faced with these stark facts, can any of us still believe that the government is primed to simply come and save us? Awareness is dawning among UK communities that it’s down to all of us to respond to the dangerous climate change we’re experiencing here and now. In our cities and neighbourhoods, at work, and everywhere else that we have power. Yes, Government must act urgently. …And with this taking too long, and worse changes to come, hyper-local, community-based adaptation action is the shape of our future.
Despite popular protestations, raising awareness of adaptation does not disrupt or delay the urgent case for limiting climate breakdown through global decarbonisation. Quite the opposite: decarbonisation and adaptation need each other. What’s more, more often than you think, they’re the same thing…
…This is the vision of strategic adaptation. From housing retrofit to upland flood management, community led and ecologically sound adaptation measures can draw down carbon, and protect against impacts; reduce emissions and reduce energy bills. All while transforming public awareness of the climate threat and building the democratic support we desperately need for climate mitigation: a win-win-win-win.
Watch this space for more on climate adaptation from the CMp’s forthcoming Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) campaign, including:
– building the case and the field for hyper-local community based adaptation action
– our demand that Government produce appropriate adaptation policy and implementation response, to fulfil their most basic responsibility: protecting its citizens (and their children) from wholly foreseeable threats.
The recent chaos caused by a major power outage in Portugal and Spain is a timely demonstration of the vulnerability of contemporary industrialised societies. Every such ‘warning shot’ builds the case for serious disaster-preparedness, and for ‘redundancy’ and back-up plans to become standard systems approaches. The time to act is now, not after an unprecedented disaster.
