Further memorandum submitted by the Environment
Agency
1. To what extent does the current Total Place
programme address adaptation?
From what we understand the current Total Places
Programme does not address climate change adaptation explicitly.
Key themes of Total Places are alcohol and drugs, health and social
care, children, crime, young people and employment. We have supplied
data, on request, to the HM Treasury on the Environment Agency's
spend in the current pilot areas.
2. Would it make sense for adaptation to be
addressed by the Total Place programme?
Total Place is a new concept that offers both
opportunities and challenges for delivering environmental outcomes
that are robust in the light of future climate change. Councils
have a key role in addressing the impacts of climate change in
their area, and they will need to work with a range of partners
to ensure that their communities are better prepared for a changing
climate. The opportunities provided by Total Place to identify
barriers to effective collaboration and enhance partnership working
are welcomed.
However, Total Place also presents some major
challenges, mainly relating to scale and cross-boundary issues.
The majority of the Environment Agency's work, for example, has
an implication for a whole river catchments, which in many cases
cross local authority boundaries. For example, decisions on flood
prevention schemes upstream can affect the flows of water and
risk of flooding in a neighbouring local authority area. The catchment
approach makes alignment of funding with strict political boundaries
potentially misleading as the benefits from our work are often
wider.
In terms of "counting" the spend of
an area, we highlighted to HM Treasury that the Environment Agency
administrative boundaries are determined by river catchment areas,
not local authority boundaries. We report our expenditure at several
levels, including national, Environment Agency Region and Area,
and by flood risk management and environmental protection functions.
We do not currently break down or report our spending by local
authority area.
Further work needs to be done to determine to
what extent a Total Place approach is appropriate for delivering
climate change adaptation and other environmental outcomes.
3. How might adaptation be built into the
Total Place programme going forward?
Currently, the most effective way of ensuring
that adaptation is built into the Total Place programme is to
ensure that both Government Departments and Local Authorities
are clear on their climate risks and adaptation priorities, so
that these can be incorporated into locally agreed objectives
as well as the design of programmes and projects.
Government Departments are currently developing
their first Departmental Adaptation Plans, which will begin to
provide this centrally. All Local Authorities need to embark on
a similar process as that set out in National Indicator 188 (Adaptation)
of the Local Government Performance Framework so they are also
clear on their adaptation priorities going forward. Evidence from
the first year of implementing the LAA framework shows that most
local authorities are still at an early stage in assessing climate
risks.
We would be interested in exploring how adaptation
to a changing climate could be best incorporated in the Total
Place programme. This could be either integrated into the programme
as described above or as a specific issue where local organisations
can identify how to use their combined resources to generate efficiencies
in delivery of adaptation measures.
11 December 2009
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