The “vast majority” of the UK government’s plans to prepare for climate hazards have made virtually no progress over the past two years, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC).
In that time, the world has experienced the hottest year on record, while England has seen its wettest ever 18-month stretch between 2022 and 2024.
(Climate adaptation – outside of some issues such as defence – is mostly a devolved matter, with separate plans in place from the administrations for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.)
The previous government introduced a new adaptation strategy for England in 2023, covering plans for rising temperatures and more extreme weather in the country.
However, in its latest analysis of the government’s progress, the CCC states that the current approach to adaptation in England is “not working” and requires “urgent strengthening”.
The government is failing to make “good” progress in adapting to climate change on any of the 46 outcomes measured by the committee, ranging from better healthcare during heatwaves to preparing financial institutions for climate risk.
The report marks the latest in a series of appraisals by the CCC that have repeatedly identified large gaps in the nation’s adaptation efforts.
This time, with a relatively new Labour government that has said it will act on adaptation, the committee says its report “must serve as the turning point”.
But the CCC also says it is “seriously concerned” that the government will cut funding for adaptation, ultimately leading to much higher future costs as temperatures continue to rise.
- Climate adaptation is ‘vital’
- What progress has been made?
- What does the CCC recommend?
- How prepared are different sectors for climate change?
Climate adaptation is ‘vital’
There is “unequivocal evidence” that climate change is already making extreme weather in the UK “more likely and more extreme”, the CCC says.
The report lays out major risks facing the country, noting that the number of properties at risk from flooding is set to increase from 6.3m today to 8m by 2050. Roads and railways at risk from flooding could increase from a third of the total length to half over the same timeframe.
At least 59% of top-quality farmland is already at risk from flooding, the report says, adding that this could also increase over the coming decades.
Meanwhile, annual heat-related deaths could increase “several times over” to pass 10,000 in an average year by 2050, the CCC says.
It also cites an Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) report from 2024 that concludes the UK’s GDP could be around 3% lower by 2074, even under the Paris Agreement’s “below 2C” goal. It says this could increase to 5% in a “below 3C” scenario, according to the OBR.
High-quality climate adaptation is therefore “vital to ensure that these risks are managed most efficiently and at least cost”, according to the committee. Otherwise, government policy could “lock in” risks or even make them worse.
The CCC reports on adaptation progress in England every two years, as required under the 2008 Climate Change Act. These reports have consistently highlighted adaptation as an issue that has been “underfunded and ignored” by successive governments.
There have been a few major developments since the committee’s last report.
Notably, the previous Conservative government launched its third national adaptation programme (NAP3), which is the cornerstone of the nation’s adaptation policy, in summer 2023. (NAP3 covers adaptation policy in England, as well as non-devolved issues that affect the whole UK, such as defence.)
In a highly critical initial appraisal of the programme, the CCC concluded that it fell “far short of what is needed” and “must be strengthened”. NAP3 has also faced an ultimately unsuccessful legal challenge from activists, arguing that it breached people’s human rights.
Another big development since the committee’s last report is Labour winning the general election in 2024. The CCC acknowledges that the new government “inherited a NAP that fell short of the task”, but says it finds “little evidence of a change of course”.
What progress has been made?
The report looks at both the “policies and plans” underpinning climate adaptation, as well as the actual “delivery and implementation” of those plans. It states:
“Whilst there is some evidence of policies and plans improving [since 2023], it is clear that NAP3 has been ineffective in driving the critical shift towards effective delivery of adaptation.”
The CCC assesses the planning and delivery of 46 outcomes from adaptation policy across five overarching themes. It scores them using roughly the same monitoring framework used in its last report in 2023.
It notes that 11 policies and plans have improved over the past two years, including a new adaptation strategy from the Ministry of Justice and a green finance strategy.
Over the same period, it says four have gotten worse, among them investment in flood protection projects, as “plans no longer align with their stated objectives”.
The lack of significant improvement between 2023 and 2025, based on the CCC’s scoring system, can be seen in the chart below.
As for the government actually delivering on its plans, the CCC says the “vast majority of our outcomes have received the same score as in 2023, most at low levels”.
The small number of improvements mainly relate to the latest round of implementation of the “adaptation reporting power”, which allows the government to ask infrastructure providers to disclose how they deal with climate risks.
The chart below, which compares the scores given to different adaptation outcomes between 2023 and 2025, demonstrates the lack of progress in the intervening years.
The CCC concludes that none of the outcomes could be classified as making “good” progress, in terms of delivery. Only four of them saw improvements over this period.
It highlights the water supply as an area where there has been backsliding over the past two years, noting that “continued slow rate of leakage reduction is now clearly inconsistent with meeting the sector’s targets”.
The CCC also points out that “tracking progress on adaptation remains challenging due to limited national-scale, up-to-date and relevant data”.
While there has been an improvement since 2023, nine of the 46 assessed outcomes for England still lacked enough evidence to assess progress, the report says.
These include important areas such as the impact of climate change on food supplies and the vulnerability of telecommunications and information and communication technology (ICT) assets.
In addition, ahead of NAP3, the CCC recommended – as part of its 2023 progress report – a list of 89 actions to close what it viewed as “policy gaps in government’s adaptation planning”.
It suggested that these could be dealt with either in NAP3 itself, or as part of other policy programmes.
However, only four of these recommendations have been achieved, with a further 14 seeing “partial progress”.
The report highlights food security, community preparedness and buildings as some of the areas where the government did not follow through on its recommendations.
What does the CCC recommend?
The CCC’s report echoes previous advice that, despite some improvements in NAP3 on previous efforts, the nation’s climate adaptation strategy needs an overhaul:
“The UK’s current approach to adaptation policy making is not working. Adaptation is not the cross-government priority that it needs to be, which is holding back delivery.”
NAP3 covers a five-year period from 2023 to 2028. With the latest report coming at a halfway point in this cycle, the committee says it “must serve as the turning point” for the government on climate adaptation.
As part of the “urgent strengthening” suggested in the report, the committee sets out key areas that it says should be improved.
“Adaptation” can mean different things in different contexts. The CCC stresses the need for a set of “specific and measurable sectoral targets” that can be used to guide progress, with clarity on how to monitor them and who is responsible.
The government has signalled its intention to strengthen adaptation objectives. The committee says that such objectives “must” be developed as a priority, no later than the end of 2025.
The CCC report highlights the “data gaps” that need to be closed, with “monitoring and evaluation…still not treated with sufficient urgency”. It says the government should direct relevant agencies to collect data on climate risks and the delivery of adaptation measures.
Adaptation is a topic that affects every area of government, from healthcare to education. Yet the CCC highlights that there is not enough coordination of activities between departments and says this should be improved.
In order to carry out adaptation policies, the CCC also stresses that the government “needs to ensure sufficient funding is available” as it undertakes its spending review. Baroness Brown, chair of the CCC’s adaptation committee, told journalists in a press briefing:
“We are seriously concerned that resilience and climate adaptation may be cut in the spending review. [The] government needs to recognise that this is not a future problem, this is today’s problem…I know the government is under a lot of pressure to make cuts, but this isn’t the easy one.”
Given the cost of future climate risk, the committee stresses that ignoring adaptation would not, ultimately, save money. In fact, acting early would “minimise the overall costs of tackling climate change”, it explains.
In the press briefing, CCC chief executive Emma Pinchbeck emphasised the “real need” for the government to think about the future when implementing key policies, such as home-building programmes and other major infrastructure developments.
“If you think about potential waste in terms of investment into the NHS, if we then have to retrofit hospitals to make them cooler,” she said, as an example.
How prepared are different sectors for climate change?
The CCC progress report looks at specific outcomes broken down across five broad sectors.
Within these, it highlights key problems and makes specific recommendations for each area.
Land, nature and food
The CCC highlights various “foundational” strategies covering farming and land that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is expected to publish in the coming months, including the land-use framework and the food strategy.
Delays in publishing such documents have “hampered” adaptation progress. However, the report highlights them as opportunities to set out clear objectives and responsibilities for the sector.
As it stands, important issues such as boosting climate-resilient farming and protecting food supply chains are rated “insufficient” for both government planning and implementation.
The CCC highlights the relatively new “environmental land management schemes” (Elms), which constitute England’s successor to the EU’s farm payments policy.
The report says these schemes lack guidance for climate adaptation, adding that the government should provide “certainty” about how much farmers will be paid for such measures.
As for the fishing industry, the report has downgraded its climate-adaptation plans, noting that they “no longer look credible”. It says the government’s marine strategy, published earlier this year, “does not include any specific or targeted adaptation actions”.
Infrastructure
According to the CCC, when the government publishes its 10-year infrastructure strategy, it should set out “clear resilience standards” for new infrastructure projects.
It also notes that major funding packages – for new roads and electricity networks, for example – should include incentives to fund climate adaptation.
Two out of the three adaptation policies that are scored as “good” are in the infrastructure sector, namely the plans for maintaining reliability in the road and rail networks.
Despite this, actual progress in improving transport resilience is largely “stagnant”, the committee says. It highlights increased flooding on railways and an increased number of roads deemed “susceptible” to flooding.
This is also the sector that has seen the most improvement in terms of delivery and implementation. The water, energy, telecommunications and transport sectors are all described as improving the identification and management of “interdependencies”.
This refers to better evidence of links between different sectors, which is being unveiled via adaptation reporting power. Notably, none of the sectors that have seen improvements are rated as “good”, indicating they still have work to do in this area.
Built environment and communities
Flooding is highlighted as the key risk facing many communities around England.
While the Environment Agency-led flood defence programme has been successful, “its budget in real terms is shrinking as risks are escalating, meaning delivery is falling short of targets and the condition of flood defence assets is declining”, according to the CCC.
The government’s investment programme needs “long-term” targets for cutting the risk posed by floods and coastal erosion, supported by sufficient funds, the report concludes.
It also recommends a “long-term cross-sector plan to manage future heat risk and drive joined-up action”.
The CCC is currently unable to track many of the important measures around heat risk, such as how many buildings are overheating, due to a lack of data.
Overall, none of the efforts to implement better protections for homes and communities have seen any positive change since 2023, despite this being a record period of heat and flooding.
Health and wellbeing
The CCC notes that there are only “limited” policies and plans in place to protect population health and healthcare delivery in the face of escalating climate hazards.
Extreme heat is the main risk identified in this context. As it stands, there are long-term, increasing trends of heat-associated deaths and overheating in hospital settings, the committee says.
In this context, the report recommends that the government develop an “improved climate and public health adaptation plan” that builds on the existing adverse weather and health plan.
Also, as part of the government’s decade-long plan to improve the NHS, the CCC says any upgrades must “make it more resilient to climate extremes today and in the future”.
Economy
The committee says that while businesses can take action to protect their own affairs from climate change, “barriers remain” and adaptation finance “remains nascent”.
It therefore highlights an important role for the government in removing these barriers, providing high-quality information and “correcting market failures”.
The report recommends setting up a portal for adaptation-related data that can be accessed by companies.
It also says the government should ensure that the UK’s sustainable disclosure requirements incorporate “adaptation-related disclosure”, to better prepare the private sector for climate risks.
The CCC also points out that an adaptation finance “deliverables and action plan”, promised for 2024, has not been produced. Among other things, this plan should lay out ways to “mobilise” private investment into adaptation projects, it adds.
The post CCC: England’s approach to climate adaptation is ‘not working’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
CCC: England’s approach to climate adaptation is ‘not working’
The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.
City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.
Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders
Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
-
‘Completely delusional’: UN climate chief warns against fossil fuel push after Iran crisis
As Gulf disruptions send oil and gas prices soaring, Simon Stiell urges leaders to double down on renewables and fight fossil fuel dependency -
Gulf oil and gas crisis sparks calls for renewables investment
Energy analysts and some politicians say the Iran war’s effect on oil and gas prices shows renewables are the path to energy security
Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition
Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
Parts of the Southern and Northeastern U.S. faced tornado threats this week. Scientists are trying to parse out the climate links in changing tornado activity.
It’s been a weird few weeks for weather across the United States.
The Ultimate Guide to Biochar: The “Black Gold” Fueling Durable Carbon Removal Market
Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders
UK Fusion £2.5B Strategy Links AI Growth with Clean Energy Breakthroughs
-
Greenhouse Gases7 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change7 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change Videos2 years ago
The toxic gas flares fuelling Nigeria’s climate change – BBC News
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Renewable Energy2 years ago
GAF Energy Completes Construction of Second Manufacturing Facility