Britain still hasn’t learned the lessons of the Somerset floods
By Lord Krebs. The Telegraph. 9 Jul 2014.
No one can say with confidence whether or not the coming winter will bring floods on the same scale as the last. The weather does not allow us the luxury of such predictability this far in advance. What we can say is that the risks of severe flooding and other extreme weather events are likely to rise in the coming years. The climate is changing because of the carbon dioxide that we have pumped into the air over the last 250 years, and that does not come without consequences. More extreme events, more often: this is what the climate models indicate. The issue is what we are going to do about it.
The destruction wrought last winter should focus our minds on reducing the risks that climate change poses to our citizens, communities and businesses. It should also provide a wake-up call over the benefits of acting. If it hadn’t been for past investment in flood defences, and improved flood forecasting and emergency planning, the impacts of the severe weather would have been much worse. As the government’s statutory adviser, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) is charged with assessing how prepared we are. This year’s progress report, which I am launching today as chair of the CCC’s Adaptation Sub-Committee (ASC), emphasises areas where more could be done.
Despite the pain of the winter, and the injection of £270 million to put right the damage done to flood defences, three-quarters of our flood defence structures are not being maintained at an ideal level. Hundreds of new flood protection projects won’t be delivered until 2019 at the earliest. Key recommendations from the Pitt Review, published in 2008 after the previous year’s floods left 13 people dead, 45,000 homes flooded and caused £3 billion worth of damage, have not yet been fulfilled.
This winter’s floods made a deep impression on our psyche, but has this translated into action to better protect people in the future? In early December last year, we experienced the largest tidal surge in 60 years, and 18,000 people had to be evacuated from low-lying areas along the east coast. The government has not commissioned a review to learn the lessons arising from this significant event.
We are putting up buildings at a faster rate in areas of high flood risk than elsewhere: in Sedgemoor District Council in the Somerset Levels, for instance, 900 new homes in areas at a significant risk of flooding have been built this century, while Intensive farming is making the land less able to absorb water and more likely to erode silt into rivers. This will increase the need for dredging. We are paving over permeable surfaces in towns and cities – the proportion of paved area in gardens leaped from 28 per cent to 48 per cent in 10 years – creating run-off problems and overwhelming drains in heavy rainstorms.
Flooding is not the only risk increased by climate change. Paradoxically, many parts of England, especially in the south and east, may not have enough water to meet future demand in the coming decades. Heatwaves are likely to become more common, so we ought to begin to adapt buildings in preparation. Instead, we find that many buildings where vulnerable people live, including hospitals and care homes as well as typical modern homes, were built for yesterday’s climate and are already difficult to keep cool.
Climate change impacts, including an increased risk of flooding, and sea level rise, are inevitable as a result of greenhouse gases that we have already put into the atmosphere. The first choice we face is whether we do more to protect ourselves against them, or suffer the consequences – which will almost certainly be more expensive as well as more disruptive.
As a statutory adviser, our committee is making a number of recommendations that can reduce the risks that lie ahead. Regulations to avoid new development causing surface water flooding, as recommended in the Pitt Review, should be introduced without delay. Councils should publish statutory flood risk management plans and strategies, and enforce regulations to prevent more gardens being lost to hard surfacing. New policies to begin to address the risks from overheating buildings should be introduced, to promote cost-effective measures such as better ventilation, shading and insulation. A new standard should be introduced to ensure that new buildings are designed with the higher temperatures of the future in mind. All of these measures are simple and could in principle be pursued straight away.
But we cannot counter climate impacts just by adapting. The second choice before us is whether we allow climate risks to escalate by continuing to emit greenhouse gases, or whether we follow the path of reducing our emissions and encouraging other countries towards the same goal. The 2008 Climate Change Act, with its legally binding targets on emissions, was a powerful statement of UK leadership, but we are far from alone. More than 500 pieces of legislation related to climate change have been introduced in 66 countries, which between them account for 88 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The actions of other countries reduce our future risk, just as our actions reduce theirs.
The precise impacts of climate change on the UK are impossible to predict with certainty, but this is not an excuse for inaction. Preparing for impacts while continuing to reduce emissions is the sensible, pragmatic choice: adaptation and mitigation going hand in hand to safeguard public health and protect the economy, as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended earlier this year.
The government’s National Adaptation Programme contains a long list of policy objectives and detailed actions. In the summer next year, the ASC will be reporting to Parliament on whether progress is being made, and crucially, whether the action being taken is making a difference. We will not be able to prevent altogether the climate changing and the resulting impacts. But we can become more resilient and reduce the costs and consequences. My committee’s report sets out how.
Lord Krebs is chair of the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change.