Engineering and professional services consultancy, WSP, has been appointed by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to conduct research to support the Government’s third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment.

Climate resilience experts at WSP are supporting the CCC on a project that will form part of the Committee’s independent Evidence Report to Government, due to be published in 2021.

The project, led by WSP, aims to identify and better understand the links and cascading effects that climate change risks have within (and across) the natural environment, built environment and infrastructure sectors. The findings  will help the UK Government and policy makers understand how to achieve effective adaptation outcomes at least cost and avoid unintended consequences.

WSP are responsible for the overall delivery of the project – the consultancy will lead the review of existing systems models and look at applying a systems lens to understand what climate risks might mean for society in the future.

Partnering with WSP, and working collaboratively to bring together expertise from across the sectors, Risk Solutions, alongside ADAS and UCL, will lead the development of a dependency model to capture interacting risks (and cascades) across the built environment, natural environment and infrastructure sectors.

Dr. Paul Munday, Climate Resilience Lead at WSP commented:

“This is an important project that will make significant contributions to the third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment evidence report.”

“Effective adaptation to climate change cannot be undertaken without careful consideration of the cross-cutting nature of risks, and trade-offs or synergies between the actions that we take to adapt. Understanding how risks interact is critical for assessing the overall costs and benefits of developing policy interventions.”

Work on the project has now commenced and will continue until January 2020.

CCC Evidence Report to look closely at key areas that require urgent action

In December 2018 the UK Government formally asked the CCC to prepare an independent Evidence Report to support the UK’s third comprehensive assessment of the risks and opportunities from climate change.

The 2008 Climate Change Act requires the Government to produce a UK Climate Change Risk Assessment every five years in order to fully assess the current and future impacts of climate change.

The first and second such assessments were published in 2012 and 2017 respectively. The third will largely draw on the CCC Adaptation Committee’s independent Evidence Report, due to be published in the summer of 2021.

The Evidence Report – funded by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – will look closely at a number of key areas that require urgent action over the next five years.

The third Evidence Report will be supported by new research, part-funded by the UK’s Research Councils, including projects on thresholds in the natural environment, future water availability, future flooding, how climate-related risks interact, and how behaviour change can affect risks and opportunities.

A number of organisations are already involved in developing the research. The CCC has also awarded a contract to a consortium of experts led by the University of Exeter and the Met Office, to prepare the technical chapters for the Evidence Report.

Kathryn Brown, Head of Adaptation at the CCC, described understanding the risks as "critical in helping the UK prepare, manage and adapt to the potential for increased flooding, drought, heat, sea level rise and severe weather."