Committee on Climate Change

Action by Government, local authorities, public sector agencies, businesses and individuals will be essential to ensuring that the UK is preparing adequately for a changing climate.  Early action will ensure that we are more resilient to cope with future risks. In addition, it will help ensure that decisions made today do not close off options and make it harder to adapt in the future.

Our first assessment of UK preparedness concluded that through taking steps to adapt, the UK could reduce the costs and damages of a changing climate and take advantage of new economic opportunities. 

We identified five priority areas for the Government to focus on in preparing their National Adaptation Programme:

1. Land use planning
2. National infrastructure
3. Designing and renovating buildings
4. Managing natural resources
5. Effective emergency planning

In our second report on preparedness, we develop the preparedness ladder into a set of indicators against which progress on adaptation can be assessed (see Figure 1.1).  In this report, we focus on the priority areas of land use planning, managing water resources and the design and renovation of residential buildings. In doing this, we address three questions based on the components of the ladder.

1. Outcomes – is the UK becoming more or less vulnerable to risks from current and future climate?
2. Actions – are we seeing sufficient uptake of low-regret adaptation actions?
3. Decision-making – are long-term decisions systematically accounting for climate risks?

The ASC's Preparedness Ladder - Click on the image below to enlarge it

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs leads on domestic adaptation policy. To find out more about the Government's role in adapting to climate change please click here.