Climate Change Adaptation – “there is no choice”
Over the past decade the UK water industry have been responding to the climate challenge, assessing the risks this presents us, and building resilience to climate change into our business and investment plans for key priorities such as flood alleviation and water resources. But the climate threat is accelerating – we are seeing more extreme events globally and locally.
This means we must go further and faster in adapting the assets that serve our customers to ensure they remain reliable, resilient and sustainable for customers now and in the years ahead. This includes working with others to ensure the services we rely on – power, transport, telecommunications and supply chains – are also resilient.
The UK Climate Change Committee guidance suggests we plan for 2 degrees and prepare for 4 degrees of warming this century. This is why we need to review our respective risk assessments to ensure we have appropriate Climate Change Adaptation Plans for each scenario. These plans set out the risks that we must address, the impacts that they have on our services and how we are going to respond. Climate change is the biggest risk to society’s future.
As a global community we must significantly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions which drive global warming. We must all play our part to transform our services to deliver net zero emissions. The world has already warmed by more than 1 degree over the past century. As a result, we can expect drier and warmer summers, wetter winters and an increasing number of storms that will impact our water and waste water services. These changes impact significantly on our industry, people, customers and communities. Each summer we are seeing significant increases in water use which put pressure on our water treatment plants, networks and employees as they worked hard to maintain service. We are also regularly seeing significant rainfall events which cause customer flooding and the risk of environmental pollution, and severe storms which can cause severe damage to our assets and those of our infrastructure partners. These events align with our understanding of how climate change will impact us, and the latest climate change risk assessments is showing that in the coming decades the scale of the negative impacts of such events on the services we provide to customers is going to increase significantly – unless we adapt.
We would be delighted to welcome you along to the UK Pavilion in Toronto, to see and hear first-hand some of the key adaptations underway across a range of services. You’ll be able to meet people from a wide spectrum of organisations who are working together to meet the significant challenges ahead for the UK Water sector.