Well-Adapted?: How what we need is STRATEGIC adaptation, to what may be coming

By Ed Jarvis and Rupert Read of the CMP’s ‘SAFER’ campaign.

The Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) Adaptation Committee has released The Fourth Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk and its conclusion is damning:

The CCC Adaptation Committee rightly reports here that “at a minimum, the UK should prepare for the weather extremes that will be experienced if global warming levels reach 2°C above preindustrial levels by 2050.”; This is a good minimum aspiration to have, but the report is clear that the UK government is incredibly far from delivering on it. Importantly, it also acknowledges that if emissions don’t come down we will pass the point where the UK can protect itself, but it isn’t explicit about what we at the Climate Majority Project (CMP) see as the very real risk of societal collapse during the next generation or two. And you don’t have to take our word for that, as we will shortly note…

The CCC’s new approach in this report for the first time, this year, is looking at 14 key systems, associated solutions and costs.

This is helpful, and that these include insurance, food security and nature restoration is of value. It is to be applauded that they want to extend their reporting remit across the whole of the food industry - thinking that must have surely been influenced by the suppressed DEFRA-plus reports on Nature security assessment on global biodiversity loss and on our country’s critical systems by the DEFRA Futures team, although neither are mentioned. Those two reports both major on the food resilience risk that is particularly high in the U.K., because of our unusually bad inability to feed ourselves as a country.

The CCC is also to be commended in that the report identifies the need for a public dialogue based on the CCC’s citizens’ panel. We’d argue that they should go further and demand a binding Citizen’s Assembly on resilience given the failure of the government to focus on preparedness.

The CCC’s report brings clarity to the costs associated with paying for a funded National Resilience Plan that is appropriate to get the country ready for what is coming (£11bn p.a.), plus the cost savings this will bring in the long term and the onus it puts on central government to come up with a fully funded plan.

It is not focused on strategic/transformative adaptation; it is very telling that one of the first examples it mentions is a focus on more air conditioning, which is a very shallow, carbon intensive and fragile way of adapting to extreme heat. There is no mention of the need to build individuals’ and communities’ ‘inner’ resilience - by that we mean our capacity to be with and process the emotions arising in response to crisis, to stay present and grounded, support one another and navigate across our differences. This is a significant gap given the emotional toll of what is coming (and is already here) and the strain this places on our individual and collective wellbeing and ability to make collective decisions to navigate crises together.

There is no mention of the super El Niño that has an increasing chance of happening this year and that could bring extreme heat this summer and excess rain this winter. The extremely and escalatingly problematic results of the situation in the Straits of Hormuz is also not included in the analysis which will compound the impact the weather has on potential food shortages this year and next. There is also no mention of AMOC collapse which will likely mean the end of most outdoor agriculture in northwestern Europe, at some unknown point in the next 100 years.

Baroness Brown of the Committee says that “the perfect should not be the enemy of the good” and and we agree - the difficulty is that we are absolutely nowhere near being prepared for what is coming and even the organisation that is holding the government accountable, the Climate Change Committee’s Adaptation Committee itself, is missing big chucks of the story and not highlighting how urgent it is to build resilience right now to face what is increasingly liable to happen this year or next.

This matter is significantly more urgent than is being put forth by the CCC; and that the kind of adaptation that we need, to make ourselves #safer as we go into the likely coming hard times, is not being nearly sufficiently advocated by them.

It is time to move beyond the narrow and shallow, carbon-heavy, fragilising attempts to keep our system staggering forward that still characterise much too much of the proposals here (eg air conditioning, hard flood defences) and switch to a much more thoroughly ecosystem-based approach that will actually transform our response - and build a readiness that can last.

This latest CCC report helpfully gives a detailed and largely damning verdict on Government preparedness. Our verdict in turn on the CCC report is that it itself understates our peril, and what would need to be radically shifted, to reduce it.