Planning to Adapt project
Update: 8th March 2011, see News Story 'Hitting the Adaptation Target!'
The Planning to Adapt project aimed to achieve an average of Level 2 (measured against the Local and Regional Adaptation Partnership guidance) across all local authorities in the region by March 2010 and an average of Level 3 by March 2011, with no authority having achieved less than Level 2. This has been achieved.
This means that local authorities have made a public commitment to identifying and managing climate related risk, that they have undertaken a comprehensive risk based assessment of vulnerabilities and opportunities to weather and climate, both now and in the future, and have identified priority risks for their services. They have identified the most effective adaptive responses and have started incorporating these in to council strategies, plans, partnerships and operations (such as planning, flood management, economic development, social care, services for children, transport etc). Appropriate adaptive responses have started to be implemented in some priority areas. In their role as community leaders, authorities have started working with their Local Strategic Partners (LSPs), encouraging identification of major weather and climate vulnerabilities and opportunities that affect the delivery of the LSP’s objectives
Most authorities have also started embedding climate impacts and risks across council decision making and have developed comprehensive adaptation action plans to deliver the necessary steps to achieve the existing objectives set out in council strategies, plans, investment decisions and partnership arrangements in light of projected climate change. Authorities are implementing appropriate adaptive responses in all priority areas.
Some authorities are moving towards Level 4 by implementing comprehensive adaptation action plans across the local authority area, in liaison with LSP partners, and putting in place a robust process for regular and continual monitoring and review.
This regional approach has proved beneficial in terms of sharing the workload and providing mutual support in developing the project. A common methodology has been developed for undertaking risk assessments, which have been carried out for main service areas in all local authorities and for the objectives in the sustainable community strategies.
The project has developed on the back of the nine Local Climate Impact Profiles, one for each city and county across the region. These short research projects developed by the UK Climate Impacts Programme investigated the impacts of recent severe weather on public services and helped service managers and decision makers to understand what they may need to do differently in order to adapt to the future climate. The LCLIP projects also engaged with Local Strategic Partnership members, including the NHS, Police, Fire Service, Universities, Probation Service, etc.
The next stages of the project will be to join up the project at a regional level, across a wider range of partners, such as Natural England, looking at adaptation projects they support as solutions to adaptation problems, working with services to ensure that outputs from the risk assessments can be used effectively and developing methodology for assessing the return on the investment.
Support to the project has been carried out by Climate Adaptation Project Officers, recent graduates or post graduates, recruited through Studentforce.
For more information, contact Mike Peverill on 07854 284 588 or [email protected]
