UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 113-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

ENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT COMMITTEE

 

 

ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE

 

 

Tuesday 1 DECEmber 2009

DR HELEN PHILLIPS and DR TOM TEW

MR ANDREW BROWN, MS PAMELA TAYLOR OBE and DR BRUCE HORTON

DR CHRIS WEST

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 68

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee

on Tuesday 1 December 2009

Members present

Mr Tim Yeo, in the Chair

Colin Challen

Mr Martin Caton

Dr Desmond Turner

Joan Walley

________________

Memorandum submitted by Natural England

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Dr Helen Phillips, Chief Executive and Dr Tom Tew, Chief Scientist, Natural England, examined.

Q1 Chairman: Good morning and welcome. I will keep the introductions to a minimum because we are driving through on quite a tight timetable this morning; we have about 30 minutes or so, and we have two more sets of witnesses after you. Thank you very much for coming in. I know that we have had fruitful private contact as well about this and other issues but it is very helpful to have you on the record this morning, so thank you for that. Can I start off with a general question? The Climate Change Act and the Adapting to Climate Change Programme have created a new framework for managing adaptation. Do you think that puts the natural environment at the centre of the adaptation agenda?

Dr Phillips: I think that the framework is evolving very rapidly and within Defra's core adaptation programme I think the natural environment is pretty fully recognised. The challenges are about how it is we make sure that this joins up across Whitehall and across government because so much of the dependence of the adaptive response relies on a healthy natural environment. So, for instance, if decisions are being taken about renewable energy we need to think about it in the round. We have had a lovely example from DECC recently where the reality of coastal erosion and the importance of designated habitats have been reflected in their decision around Dungeness not to proceed with that as a proposed nuclear site. However, we have other examples: for example, in CLG where we are somewhat at the pinnacle of strategy perfection about green infrastructure and its benefits, but yet we have a number of blocks and barriers in the system seeing it being implemented and delivered at a substantial scale the length and breadth of the country. I think that this possibly links into the issue about costs and benefits. There is a tendency that is almost unavoidable, but must be avoided in this case, to look at costs and benefits in a particular suite of circumstances and we need to be thinking about the costs and benefits across government. The example I give there is the Department of Health, where of course green infrastructure can substantially have a positive impact on urban cooling and health in depth related to heat. So we need to be thinking while we are planning green infrastructure about what the implications are for the Department of Health and their proposed future expenditure on issues such as that. Finally what I would say is about the importance of the natural environment not being seen as something that can be traded off within any framework. It is not something that is to be traded or balanced with something that is to be another fundamental building block on which the whole adaptive response is considered. Also, I suppose, the responsibility on us as environmentalists to find a currency and a language that is better understood. We had a modest attempt at that ourselves in a recent publication called No Charge - something of a play on words - about the importance of long-term investment in the natural environment. It is about how it is that we can show what the benefits are beyond intrinsic benefits from the environment, but how it is that it props up and sustains the social and economic benefits.

Dr Tew: I think that last point is absolutely key. There are two very good reasons for enabling the natural environment to adapt to climate change and one, of course, is a moral imperative that we have to allow our plants and animals to adapt, but the second is that a healthy natural environment is the best mechanism to allow us to adapt to climate change, and that is why a healthy natural environment should not be left in the environmental ghetto or with Defra and that is why cross-Whitehall attention on a healthy natural environment is so important because an unhealthy natural environment has implications for health, transport and lots of other things. So in the national framework, where you have the four work streams of evidence, awareness, measuring progress and policy, and you have a thematic approach where the environment is one theme, it is important that the environment does not stay in that ghetto. That is why Treasury, Health and all the other departments need to understand the importance of a natural environment, as Helen has explained.

Q2 Chairman: Accepting the importance of the natural environment what happens if a department or, indeed, a public body simply does not take account of the natural environment when they are making their adaptation plans?

Dr Phillips: I think there will be a huge cost to the taxpayer in the longer term. Nicholas Stern's report has been extraordinarily influential in terms of mitigation and governments across the world understand the fact that it is much more cost-effective to invest early in what will inevitably turn out to be more modest sums. The fact that we are locked into a certain amount of climate change already, despite whatever our parallel efforts might be on mitigation, that needs to be a very concerted programme; it needs to be good adaptation rather than bad adaptation, and we need to recognise, of course, that properly planned adaptation can also support mitigation measures. So if we do not we will frankly pay quite dearly.

Q3 Chairman: Can you hold up a warning flag if you see this happening in another part of the country?

Dr Tew: That is why the design of the reporting powers and the adaptation economic assessment are crucial bits of work to get absolutely right because the second will illustrate the financial foolishness of maladapted, unsustainable adaptation; and the first will direct government departments and local authorities to report in a transparent way on what they are doing and how they are taking the environment into account.

Q4 Colin Challen: What opportunities does Natural England have to influence policy on adaptation? Do you think you have enough influence and, if not, perhaps you could explain where there are deficiencies and how you might be able to improve matters?

Dr Phillips: We have talked about an evolving framework and as part of that Defra have created a domestic adaptation programme and we sit on that programme board that is chaired by Defra. We are also part of a very important work stream that sits under that looking at some of the tools and levers that there are to make that come into being, most importantly, of course, the reporting power and how it is that public bodies assess and report on their progress with adaptation. They are important places to play, and of course in our wider statutory adviser role across government we are in a position to advise other government departments on how it is that climate change adaptation could be built in. I suppose that we couple that to an extent with trying to lead by example. So you are probably aware that we spend the best part of half a billion pounds a year in payments to farmers and land managers for good environmental practices on their farms and land. We sourced through the review of environmental stewardship recently to make sure that climate change was an overarching theme and something we could be legitimately tackling as part of those payments rather than something we try to find opportunities to do as we went round the country. Our current estimate is that emissions from agriculture will be 11 per cent higher than they are currently was it not for the measures that have been put in place through environmental stewardship. Of course, we also have opportunities through our pretty close interactions with other bodies, such as National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, where there is a real opportunity to be at the forefront of land management practices, and so much of the adaptive response, of course, is dependent on land management practices.

Q5 Colin Challen: You have said that the potential for green infrastructure has not yet been realised or perhaps even fully understood by Government. Given that, I have just had a letter from a company in my constituency that makes permeable paving complaining that local government also does not really recognise its responsibilities in this regard. What do you think can be done to address that?

Dr Phillips: We really urgently need to get away from a situation where we understand the benefits of green infrastructure, where we have fabulous examples of how it can be done well. On our website our best seller in terms of downloads used to be about newts and protected species and as soon as we put up a new best practice guide giving 36 examples of how to do the green infrastructure well we had something like 1,000 hits within a couple of weeks and this rapidly went up the agenda. We seem to be engaging with the community of the engaged and we do not have simple but mainstream ways of making green infrastructure happen and in our view there are some very simple things that could be done. The first is that we are in the middle of a review of planning policy guidance with a number of planning policy statements being brought together and in those it would be enormously powerful if targets could be set in terms of the amount and the quality of green infrastructure. Some standards have been set in the context of eco towns but, as we know, that is on the margins of development rather than in the main thrust and the main stream of development. Whilst I would be loathe to indiscriminately foist more targets on local authorities who are often beleaguered measuring things, I think a matching indicator of progress against that target in planning guidance would change the landscape. In addition to that - and this goes to the issue of quality - we need to make sure that the green infrastructure is seen as a deliberative response in our approach to adaptation rather than the incidental re-badging of local amenity or local conservation sites. Not that amenity and conservation sites are not very important, of course they are, but, as we know, green infrastructure can be so much more in terms of trees, urban cooling, shading and, indeed, the matter you have come across in your constituency, about sustainable drainage, balancing ponds, soaking up the storm water run-off.

Q6 Colin Challen: On your website do you also put up examples of worst practice?

Dr Phillips: No, we do not.

Q7 Colin Challen: Is it worth considering?

Dr Phillips: We are getting close to that point. I am a great believer in encouraging good practice and in fact we have gone a bit further with writing in and congratulating local authorities who are doing it particularly well, and we are encouraging that sharing of good practice. We are considering though, in the not too distant future, perhaps letting local authorities see how they are doing not only on green infrastructure but perhaps around a suite of measures such as the indicator that they have currently on biodiversity and, indeed, the responsibilities that they have for biodiversity under the NERC Act. I think it is always a fine balance, is it not? There is so much that can be achieved once this properly captures the imagination, and once they understand what the benefits are to the local economy in terms of considering a whole site for development, that they are not considering housing units but actually considering that entire amenity. So I think with that whole site one has real opportunity. As, indeed, has the Government's initiative on zero carbon homes where we are thinking about the quality of the built environment but we are not thinking about the quality of the associated natural environment that potentially has huge implications for the longer term running costs of that neighbourhood.

Q8 Colin Challen: Do you come across much evidence of, shall we say, moral hazard where people think that by not adapting to climate change nevertheless the Government will act as insurer of last resort and just pay for anything that goes disastrously wrong? I am not saying that this is true of any part of the country that is currently afflicted by floods, but if you believe that the Government will pay for the rebuilding of your destroyed bridges then you may decide that is not a current priority for capital expenditure and you will just make things last a bit longer. Everybody is under a lot of financial pressure at the moment.

Dr Phillips: Absolutely, and the issue in that regard that is most frequently talked about in the context of green infrastructure is maintenance costs. So often it is easy, either through development contribution or, indeed, through the local authority's own capital grants to put things in place in the first case but then there is often real anxiety and, indeed, a lot of evidence that they are not looked after in the long term. There is that lovely example in Milton Keynes where a lot of the green space has been put in public trust. It works there; there is no reason to say it will work everywhere, but we do need to think about what those mechanisms are in the longer term and that the whole life cost is a consideration rather than the more short term consideration.

Dr Tew: The examples that you raise get to the crux of the problem here, which is equity, inter-generational equity and, indeed, spatial equity. Who bears the cost of coastal erosion or flooding? This is a deep societal challenge. Part of the argument, of course, is to say that the insurance companies will mop up after the floods but it is the premium holders that pay for insurance costs and it is more expensive to pay for the damage than it is to manage the Uplands and prevent the damage. These are deep issues of equity that is the problem.

Q9 Joan Walley: In what you have just said you have stressed the importance of the cost cutting agenda across Whitehall and I am really looking at the role in the Treasury in all of that. I am interested to know how you think the signals that the Treasury is actually sending; to what extent they are supporting and enabling adaptation. I wondered what your comments are about how effective the Treasury is in getting the right messages across.

Dr Phillips: I always think that Treasury is to government what the national curriculum is to our collective desire to have schoolchildren taught things. There is no getting away from the fact that they are very pivotal to this and there is one comment I would make before Tom says some more. That is we were really pleased to see the work that the Treasury and Defra have done together in the supplementary guidance on the Green Book, and that could be quite an important driver in terms of investment.

Q10 Joan Walley: I am sorry; did you say updated guidance on the Green Book?

Dr Phillips: Updated, supplementary guidance on the Green Book in the context of climate change.

Q11 Joan Walley: How is that effectively sending out messages about what needs to be done?

Dr Phillips: The Green Book is something of a bible for those who are thinking about making investment or de-investment decisions and it talks very fully about the important principles of sustainable development and, by implication, sustainable adaptation. I suppose one criticism of it would be that it talks about effectiveness and efficiency and equity; it does not explicitly talk about the natural environment. Consequently, our concern would be that when people come to do cost benefit analysis they think literally about the cost and, as we all know, sometimes the environment is a marginal cost where there is a lower cost solution but does not give you a sustainable solution in the long-term. So if we could see a more explicit reference to that I think it would make a big difference. Also, if we made sure that whatever it is we were measuring in terms of progress towards climate change adaptation included a measure about the quality of the natural environment because unless we have a response to adaptation which is based on an investment in the natural environment and that all measures are actually leaving a more resilient natural environment we will not have the fundamentals in place for that longer term response.

Dr Tew: Absolutely. We think that the Treasury are trying hard and they are moving and it is very welcome, but one sometimes thinks that they think the environment is someone else's job rather than it being a job for society, and I think that was probably reflected in the National Audit Office assessment.

Q12 Joan Walley: It is a bit of a bold comment to make, is it not?

Dr Tew: The one I have just made?

Q13 Joan Walley: Yes.

Dr Tew: I think that the environment is everyone's responsibility and we are trying to provide costed examples to illustrate why putting the environment at the heart of adaptation is the most cost-effective solution for society and that is why I think the economic assessment of adaptation is critically important.

Q14 Joan Walley: Can you tell me when the latest revision of the Green Book came out because the perversely called Green Book has been a matter of concern to this Committee for a long time because we have not really felt that it has been doing green things, although it might be called the Green Book? Which update are you talking about in terms of the revision to it?

Dr Phillips: The supplementary guidance published in June of this year.

Q15 Joan Walley: Because that does not come along very often, so are you saying then that that supplementary guidance is absolutely fit for purpose?

Dr Phillips: No.

Q16 Joan Walley: You are not?

Dr Tew: We are saying that the supplementary guidance, which talks about effectiveness, efficiency and equity, is a good place to start defining sustainable adaptation.

Q17 Joan Walley: But would it not have been better to have actually got it right rather than just doing something that now needs to be changed and adapted and adapted even further?

Dr Tew: We do not think that it has the environment at the heart of the guidance in the way that we would like.

Q18 Joan Walley: So how are you or how is Defra or how is this Committee going to put pressure on the Treasury to get the environment at the heart of that Green Book so that it can genuinely be a Green Book from the Treasury that is underpinning investment decisions across Whitehall?

Dr Phillips: Could I give you an anecdote from the publication of our recent report called No Charge, which will share the difficulty we had and possibly the difficulty that Treasury are having?

Q19 Joan Walley: Please do.

Dr Phillips: We set out with grand plans for this publication and were very much hoping that we were going to build the report up to a crescendo on the back page that would show investment strategies for five, ten, 15, 20 years, saying that if you invest this much in the natural environment the payback or, indeed, the cost avoided will be as much, so there is a very clear example of an investment strategy for a relatively long period of time that says this is a no-brainer. Despite having used our own best brains and having worked with colleagues in academia, and indeed elsewhere, and environmental economists there was a lot of anxiety, despite a lot of encouragement from me and others to do just this, about the quality of the evidence and about how robust it was. So instead we ended up publishing a report that contains about a dozen fabulous case studies, they are all peer reviewed, they are all assessed and there are not holes or flaws in them and consequently we can hold our head high about people who produce evidence-based studies, but invariably we find ourselves looking at examples. There is a lovely example about the importance of investing in the Uplands in terms of retaining water, reducing flooding impact downstream, about reducing cost to water companies of cleaning up water when it gets to the treatment works, about the benefits to biodiversity. There is a similar lovely example about the end-cost benefits of managed treatment; for example, on the Humber Estuary moving the flood bank back and creating intertidal habitat has afforded much greater degree of protection to homes and to land at a lower cost and with much less requirement for ongoing revenue to contain that. So until such a time as we create a greater awareness and indeed more confidence that these are indeed cost beneficial ways and sensible investments for the long term, and until such a time as we can find a way of mainstreaming that into the language of economics rather than pointing out good examples of where it has happened, there is a degree of nervousness of putting this as a requirement or imposition on others.

Q20 Joan Walley: But surely that is the role of Defra's Adapting to Climate Change Programme, to actually influence the Treasury to do just that, because you say until the time comes when we can do it but we do not have the time to do it because the time to take action is now?

Dr Tew: Yes, and the Cross-Whitehall Programme Board illustrates the desire and the willingness for cooperation across government. The problem is that the cost is this equity issue - who bears the cost and who pays the cost - and that is spread across time and space and these are complicated decisions for local planning authorities to make. We think that by illustrating, using examples as Helen says, one or two clear cases, over the course of 20 years it is cheaper to realign the coast than it is to build a concrete flood wall. It is simply cheaper over 20 years; there are less maintenance costs and there are more positive side-effects and those side-effects include carbon sequestration and nutrient recycling and commercial fish species and places for people to go and enjoy and they are more resilient than a concrete wall and they are more adaptable to any future changes. Those illustrations are hard won. We are looking at existing realignment schemes and it has taken ten or 15 years to start to report on them. So I have sympathy for Treasury, it is not easy to come up with quick and clear examples of why it always makes economic sense.

Dr Phillips: It does underline the case though for having planned adaptation and a wide scale plan about the extent and scale and pace of the adaptation measures we are going to put in place and consequently the reporting framework we have talked about and behind that its progress towards that rather than some indiscriminate measures of things that might help in the future.

Q21 Dr Turner: You have embedded adaptation throughout all of your operations in Natural England, which seems to put you well ahead of most government departments. How have you approached that job - top-down, bottom-up? Could you tell us about how you evolved your strategy?

Dr Phillips: I am happy to tell you. It is most like things, I think it has met in the middle. There have been some top-down initiatives and a lot of innovation from the ground up. To give you a few examples of some of the stuff we have done. We inherited as an organisation a framework about the character of England. Te English landscape is divided into 159 character areas, and some decades ago we beautifully described those and, indeed, we went to the trouble of describing the pressures of those areas of landscape. Somewhat surprisingly, we never described what the desired response in any of those landscapes would be; nor did we think - and perhaps not unreasonably at that time ago - what the desired response under various scenarios of climate change would be. So we have taken four of those areas and done just that. I suppose not surprisingly we see both differences depending on the type of habitat, whether it is the Cumbria High Fells or the Norfolk Broads, but also a degree of similarity about the things that need to be done, which often involve making sure that the habitat that is in good condition is kept in good condition; where there are opportunities to extend it it is extended; or where it is in poor condition it is restored; and, indeed, that the land management practice is such that it is keeping that land in good condition. What we really thought was important - and this is some work that Tom is leading for us - was to expand that into looking at the functions that are provided by a healthy ecosystem because there are a lot of functions that we are dependent on land managers to produce that only the natural environment can produce; that we need to be very careful to guard the public funds that are used currently to incentivise various practices to reduce those things that only those folk can provide for public good rather than necessarily or exclusively personal gain. So we are doing that and that will then form the basis of a very important contribution to our own adaptation framework. We are also working alongside others because you know that this is quite a big responsibility on public bodies, so Anglian Water, for example, would obviously be very much at the forefront of this in an area that will become increasingly water stressed. We are working alongside them and ensuring that what their response looks like perhaps will provide a good example more widely across the water industry. From our own perspective we have agreed with Defra to become a voluntary reporter under the scheme, so hopefully we will be able to help others in that way too.

Dr Tew: If I may make one other point, which is that across all of our work programmes, which we organise into communities, each and every work programme is being asked to complete an assessment of the threats and opportunities for their work presented by climate change, and to identify responses and actions; and we are now writing guidance for the staff to know how to do that. We will have an internal programme board to review what that looks like as a whole, to review the independencies, to agree overall risks to our work programme and then to embed actions and resources for dealing with climate change in our corporate plan, and that is the kind of thing, as Helen says, that we have volunteered to report to Government as an exemplar of good practice.

Q22 Dr Turner: Fine. What do you find to be the benefits of incorporating climate change in this way into your risk management and what lessons can you draw from your experience for other central Government departments seeking to embed adaptation into their programmes?

Dr Tew: We are delighted to be finding that it is cheaper and more effective to adapt and to prepare for climate change than to deal with the consequences afterwards. There is evidence for that in our management of our own sites, in our influence over National Parks. It is better to prepare and plan ahead, and those are the lessons we draw. We are finding, in purely financial terms for instance, that our own target to cut our own carbon emissions by 50 per cent in two years not only clearly has an input to society's mitigation but actually is a cheaper and more cost-effective way for us to work. It raises a whole suite of challenges for our staff, but it saves us money and makes us more effective and contributes to climate change.

Q23 Dr Turner: Can you point to any practical examples which prove that this approach is working?

Dr Tew: Practical examples of mitigation I just talked about there of cutting carbon. Our people are travelling less; we have fewer offices open; we are encouraging flexible working and that is saving us money.

Q24 Dr Turner: Can you point, for example, to where extreme weather events have produced results which are not as bad as you thought they might have been in other circumstances?

Dr Tew: I see. That is very difficult and that is a challenge for us who espouse the doctrine that sustainable land management in the Uplands will reduce flooding because you have no control and then you get a one in a thousand year event, as we had last week, and people say to you, "That did not work then, did it?" So that is a significant challenge. As Helen says, we are setting up three very large pilot projects in the Uplands and I am working very closely with the Research Councils of this country to put in place monitoring in those projects because we have to start attempting to address that question. We would like to demonstrate how a new approach changes land management - in other words, land managers are rewarded for delivering a range of services and change their management accordingly - and produces a change in ecosystem services, such as better flood defence or higher quality; and we would like to demonstrate how that also produces a higher environmental quality, but it is not something you can do overnight.

Dr Phillips: Very briefly, if I may, to take a link between your question back to Ms Walley's question, which is about urgent action is required now and we cannot wait until we have all the evidence in place, and I really could not agree with you more. That is something that we are trying to do in our review of our Sites of Special Scientific Interest notification strategy, because you get detractors who say, "Why are you protecting all these places? Under climate change scenarios they will no longer be important for the species or habitats they are designated for; why are we continuing to make this big investment?" To which there is a fairly simple answer, which is that they are the areas that have been most heavily invested in, the highest quality natural environment and despite what the natural succession might be in them they will still be more resilient as we experience higher temperatures and more variable patterns. The other evidence that is coming to the fore, albeit that it is less well based than we would like, is about the importance of connectivity and connecting different areas of habitat. So we are now trying to make sure that our notification strategy in the future and, indeed, for instance some of our work on initiatives such as the coastal path are actually thinking about where there is a real opportunity to join places up so that when species do inevitably have to move inland, uphill or north that there are more opportunities for them to do so. Also, and in fact I am sure that this will come up in the Secretary of State's announced review of ecological designations, how it is that landscape designations and ecological designations might come together because we are often talking about having to work on a much wider area, on a landscape scale rather than a site scale, so could those landscape designations that have been very successfully looking after areas of great beauty or areas where there is real opportunity for amenity and recreation legitimately bear a wider set of criteria that would also take into account some of the things that we need to do in response to climate change, where we could get large tracts of land for that purpose, not in a way that excluded other uses but in a way that could be integrated alongside places where people live and work.

Q25 Mr Caton: In your memorandum you made the point that future monitoring and reporting arrangements should include measures to show whether adaptation is leading to a healthier and more resilient natural environment. How should this be done, by whom and do we already have the measures and the data sources to be used?

Dr Tew: I think you are hinting at the answer there, which is that what we cannot do is throw all our environmental monitoring schemes away and start again. We already in this country invest significantly in environmental monitoring and, indeed, Natural England supports or runs many of those programmes. There is a wide range of environmental monitoring that we already do and that now needs to be bent to answering the question of whether we are adapting successfully to climate change; and it needs to do so in an integrated way. We think that the future of monitoring is integrated monitoring and we are working closely with everyone else who is involved in this field via the Environmental Research Funders Forum to look at synergy between monitoring, to look at cost-effective and streamlined monitoring and to look at novel techniques in monitoring, for instance satellite monitoring and so on. All of our existing monitoring schemes must now bear in mind that we need to start answering the question of how we are adapting to climate change and whether that adaptation is being effective, and that will range from everything from understanding whether butterflies are migrating north via the data collection of thousands of volunteers, all the way to a satellite-based analysis of sea level rise and coastal geomorphological changes. A significant gap in the evidence base and in monitoring are these indicators of adaptive process and then indicators of effects, and the Committee will know that Defra are working on this at the moment and we are working closely with Defra. One of the things that we mentioned earlier, for instance, is green infrastructure. There may be some very good proxies for measuring societal response to climate change adaptation, so we think that all of those need investigating.

Chairman: Thank you very much. We very much appreciate your coming in.

Memorandum submitted by Water UK

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Andrew Brown, Climate Change Manager, Anglian Water; Ms Pamela Taylor OBE, Chief Executive, and Dr Bruce Horton, Environmental Policy Adviser, Water UK, gave evidence.

Q26 Chairman: Good morning and welcome. We are quite tight for time this morning so we will press on without too many formalities, but we appreciate your coming in. The water industry is clearly in the frontline facing the consequences of carbon change - very much so - not just in this country but elsewhere. Do you think that the statutory framework which the Climate Change Act has established puts us on the right path for adaptation?

Ms Taylor: Yes, we certainly do. We have been very pleased to see that adaptation has been brought into the Climate Change Act; that was exactly what was needed. As you quite rightly say, water is the place where we will feel it most. If you get it right in every other sector but you get it wrong in water then as a nation and globally we will fail. So, yes, it has been very important to us that adaptation has been brought into the Act, and that is good.

Q27 Chairman: Defra's Adapting to Climate Change Programme has also established an organisational framework, is that the right sort of approach as well? Is that going to be efficient in promoting adaptation measures?

Ms Taylor: Yes. I think that the work Defra is doing is good. One of the things that we do not yet know is how well plugged in the work that Defra is doing is across all government departments and also how high up it is plugged in there as well. It is no use if a small group of people are doing some very, very good work but if they are not actually having the impact and the influence that we need across government then really their work will be wasted. So we certainly do need to make sure that we support them sufficiently, but it will take more than just us in order to support them to make sure that happens.

Dr Horton: If I could just add to the point that Pamela made earlier. It is really important with the profile of climate change that all the good work that Defra and the Government has been doing over the last year or two really takes a step forward. If you look at Copenhagen coming up next week I understand that although adaptation is on the agenda, references to water have been removed from the text that is going to be discussed.

Ms Taylor: Which is absolutely stunning.

Dr Horton: If water is central to the impacts of climate change then that seems like a lost opportunity in terms of being able to raise the profile of what we need to do as a nation.

Ms Taylor: That is a perfect illustration of what we are saying, that you can have good intent with the Act; you can have some very good people working very constructively with us in Defra, but where it really matters, where it really hurts in terms of making things come about and change, such as Copenhagen, we do not see water there and this is just crazy.

Q28 Chairman: As a Committee with a cross-departmental remit we are quite familiar with the difficulty of getting genuinely good intentions from one department reflected in what other departments are doing.

Ms Taylor: Exactly. Also there is the question of whether other sectors who are not part of Defra's remit recognise and understand the role that they have regarding adaptation and whether they have understood what role they will need to play in the future because many other sectors - we are talking about the future that we are feeling the impacts of climate change now in the water sector - are not necessarily recognising this and so for them the future is too far away for them to feel they have to be doing something about it now, and we must work in partnership.

Q29 Dr Turner: Lord Stern identified that imperfect information on the impacts of climate change is a potential barrier to adaptation. What do you think that the Government should do to address gaps or imperfections in the information? Does the Government have the adequate scientific capacity at its core to provide the information that is needed?

Ms Taylor: We have been pleased with the information that we have been given and the projections that we have been given, so we are certainly not complaining that we have not had the information we would like and we are certainly not complaining that information is not as adequate as it could be. The thing that really matters now, particularly in the water sector, is what we need to do now is more modelling than you could ever imagine in your lives in terms of actually using well the information that we have already been given. That is the key thing. Certainly, for example, Andy in Anglian, if it would be okay to give an illustration of the kinds of things that you would need to do in order to make that work for you.

Mr Brown: Yes. Certainly the 2009 projections with the addition of probabilities is a great enhancement on the projections that we were using in the past. We were lucky enough to be involved in the development of that and in the use of the dummy data, actually feeding back information to UKCIP and looking at how that can be incorporated into modelling river levels and the impact that will have on filling reservoirs under various scenarios into the future. We see climate change as it is a risk to the business and so we approach it as we would any other risk to our business. The more information and the better the quality of information the better, but we will use the information that we have to work out the risks to our business and plan for the future. What we can look forward to, and what we might ask the Government, is the other agencies that we are involved with and inter-dependent with have the right resources in order to be able to do the work that they would need to do to support our industry.

Q30 Dr Turner: Could you tell us then how water companies in particular are starting to use the climate change projections model for the UK? What sort of adaptations are the water companies starting to introduce?

Dr Horton: If I could kick off with that? When the projections came out - even before they came out - as Andy said, we were working with UKCIP to look at what information would become available and how we would use that because it is really complex and you have a number of different scenarios and the scenarios get multiplied as you look at what might happen to emissions and how that impacts on whether high, medium or low emissions and anything in-between will impact on things like precipitation and how that impacts on river flows and how that impacts on the amount of water that we have available, which is obviously our key resource. We did work very closely with UKCIP and Defra. We held the first Projections in Practice event, which is a means of rolling out the projections and we now have projects, one research project that is being finalised now and others that have been planned to look at what impact the new projections will have on demand for water, what impacts it will have on water availability for a range of different sources of water, from reservoirs to river flows, and so on. Probably the main thing is trying to take account of the uncertainty because, as Andy said, it is one risk amongst others. We have to plan for projected growth; we have to plan for pollution of the water environment and how we take account of that; the economic circumstances in which we find ourselves. So we need to build it into the risk framework, but given the complexity of the new information that takes quite a lot of time and quite a lot of resource to do properly and most effectively.

Q31 Dr Turner: The kinds of problems that you are likely to encounter basically boil down to either too much water at any given time or too little. Presumably for either of those extreme ends of risks you need to undertake a certain amount of investment and physical adaptation. Could you tell us something about your thinking on that?

Ms Taylor: The companies actually worked on the projections when we were submitting our evidence. Each company submits its own evidence, its case, if you like, to the economic regulator, Ofwat. The companies worked on the projections that they had available at the time, which were not the 2009 projections but the 2002 projections. At that time the Environment Agency and Government were encouraging us to work on those projections because they were the only ones we had, so that is what was used by the companies. So the companies did the work and put their case to the economic regulator as to what would be required in terms of resilience and whatever else would need to be done in terms of climate change, but the economic regulator in its wisdom decided that because the information was 2002 and not 2009 that in fact they would not allow it. So we are facing at the moment probably over £1 billion worth of investment that we should be seeing in this coming five year cycle having at the moment been crossed out. We personally, the industry, do not think that is a way properly to deal with climate change and to take it into account. That has been a great setback for us. We understand that waiting for the 2009 projections would be ideal, but I do not think anyone was feeling that in the few months that they were late, if you like, coming to us that suddenly the 2009 projections were going to say, "Phew! It is all right, there is no such thing as climate change and you need not plan for it." It was more than a disappointment because with a long-term industry you cannot do that. For example, some companies were putting in that they are upgrading their sewers now and those sewage systems, as we know from replacing Victorian mains, are expected to last for quite a long time, but the ability to plan and to add in planning for climate change to upgrading a sewage system has been crossed out by Ofwat in some circumstances and that makes no sense at all for a sewage system that you are actually upgrading at the moment.

Q32 Dr Turner: Presumably the required investment of about £1 billion ---

Ms Taylor: Across the industry.

Q33 Dr Turner: Has been delayed or has not happened.

Ms Taylor: Yes.

Q34 Dr Turner: Presumably you must have some approximate estimate of the size of risk through damage, through lack of that investment that it implies?

Ms Taylor: That is exactly what individual companies are looking at right now because their so-called final determinations, which is, if you like, the final decision of Ofwat, they only received last week. Many companies have, in fact, been working lots of people through the night looking at what it is they are being offered as the package by Ofwat and it is a very complex package. Companies have up to two months to look at that and to be able to either object or say, "Okay, we can deal with this". So the picture is not clear yet, but certainly that estimate of over one billion stands up at the moment.

Q35 Mr Caton: Every water company has to consider adaptation as part of its 25-year strategic direction statement, as part of its shorter term strategic business plan and water resource management plan. Is this mix of long and short-term planning a good approach to tackling climate change and are there lessons for other bodies?

Ms Taylor: It is a very good way of doing it. The thing is, though, whether then having established the way of doing it you then allow that process to happen on the ground. Yes, companies welcomed the idea of the 25-year strategic direction statements; certainly climate change was taken into account very much so in those statements. Companies also produce water resource management plans where climate change is taken into account as well. When you look at the Water Framework Directive then the river basin management plans take climate change into account too. So this all looks lovely, but then you have to say that if you have a price review - which as you know once every five years we do and the people who hold the ring for that are the economic regulator - every five years the price review ought to be a step on the road to that longer term planning and implementing that longer term planning. Where it falls down is if companies feel - and this will vary from company - that in fact it has not been a step on the way but has been a short-term, "Whoa, let us be careful here" or "Let us take a shorter term look at this rather than a longer term"; or "Let us try to keep the prices as low as possibly" - obviously we want to do that for our customers - some short-term things inevitably start crowding in there and the thing is do the short-term things crowd out the longer term planning? So the process is good but how it is implemented individual companies will want to look at that.

Dr Horton: What we are looking for overall is consistency between the high level aspirations of Government and how we want to adapt to climate change as a nation and the role of the Government agencies and bodies to make sure that that is actually implemented. Pamela mentioned Ofwat, Andy mentioned the Environment Agency, Natural England and our other key regulators as well, and we need to make sure that they have the funding, resources and ability to take account of actions that we need to take to adapt to climate change.

Mr Brown: If I could just add to that point. There were elements of climate change adaptation which did make through into some of our final determinations, so there were positive points and there has been movement. We have funding for a number of the top priority fluvial flooding protection schemes for our critical water infrastructure; so there are positives. Steps have been made but we have to constantly think about that 24-year vision, if not further.

Dr Horton: A lot of the actions to adapt to climate change are actually consistent with good practice business anyway and I do not think we are suggesting that you need to invest billions and billions of pounds in what might turn out to be a white elephant because some of the impacts of climate change do not turn out to be exactly as we thought they might have been. In the water industry we are really focusing on adaptive management which is making sure that the investment we make now makes sense anyway but makes even more sense if you look at the impacts of climate change, so things like leakage management, resilience of our assets and water efficiency. Those are the kinds of things that incrementally over time you can invest in and make good sense anyway, and if you add in the impacts of climate change then that makes good business sense.

Q36 Joan Walley: I am getting lots of different conflicting messages. You have said that the latest Ofwat review was a setback - that was how you described it - yet it seems to me from the evidence that you have given us that there was a very strong steer from Government that the regulator should be taking onboard the whole issue of adaptation and that view or that steer seems to have been backed up by a recent report of the Defra Select Committee, yet in the 2009 Price Review it seems that we have an economic regulator without any basis for encouraging sustainability and the long-term issues. Why do you think that Ofwat did not follow the Government's lead on this and how much of a problem is it?

Ms Taylor: We do not know why they did not follow the Government lead and it was a lead obviously from Government; it was also a lead from the Environment Agency. Also, as I was saying earlier, it is something that the water companies had been encouraged obviously to do and we had wanted to do that and to play our part in terms of planning for the impacts of climate change. We do not know why Ofwat did what they did; we can only say that over a billion so far probably has been lost to us in terms of investment to address climate change and that is investment that is lost. The need for investment obviously will not go away.

Dr Horton: I would say that I think progress is being made and we are quite encouraged by some of the progress that Ofwat has made in the last couple of years. They do have a climate change team now which they did not have in the past.

Ms Taylor: And they are good.

Dr Horton: They have issued position statements and policies on climate change, which is quite new for them actually. If you look at where they have come from they have made quite a lot of progress in quite a short space of time. What we are looking for really is to think, after this price review about how the regulatory framework in general works and does it deal with the long-term challenges in the right way because if you have this five-year system of operational expenditure and investment that is clawed back after five years it disincentivises long-term investment and actions with long-term benefits, and climate change adaptation is a classic case where you have long term benefits and those are really hard to bring into essentially a five-year review programme.

Q37 Joan Walley: You are rushing to defend Ofwat and earlier on you talked about it being the economic regulator and I wonder whether or not you feel that the remit of Ofwat falls short of what it should be because it seems that there does not seem to be this environmental sustainable aspect of it at the core of its regulatory function. Would you agree with me on that?

Ms Taylor: It links to the question we were being asked earlier: did Ofwat set out a process that was good? Yes, it did. Is it better than processes we have ever had before? Yes, they were. Has Ofwat now got a good team, a very good team when it comes to climate change? Yes, they have; they are very impressive. Did we think we were embarking this time on a really long term look at the sector helped, I must say, by Defra's Strategic Review, which was a very, very good government review indeed? Yes to all those things. At the last minute did too many short term things crowd in? Possibly, yes. So individual companies will feel the impact of whether there has been too much short-termism and whether that balance has been struck incorrectly. Individual companies, as I say, have up to two months to study what it is that they have been given by the economic regulator; so there is the potential for us to be in a much better position than before. The process was far better than before in terms of looking at things longer term, but has the actual fact at the end of it given us that longer term look? We do not believe it has. Individual companies will be the judge of that. Will we play our part, as Bruce was saying, in terms of looking at regulation in the future, making sure that long-term environmental considerations can be taken into account? Yes, we will. Will we also play our role in making sure that all the things that impact on climate change, whether it is population growth, whether it is the way in which you deal with flooding, the way in which sustainable urban drainage is owned or not owned, where the funding comes from, all those things, we will not just sit on our hands and say that it is too difficult; we will play a role in that. Yes, we do need joined-up regulators, government, to help us to do that in partnership.

Q38 Joan Walley: Nonetheless, despite all of that the net effect of the recent determination is that there is going to be a delay in climate change in investment in water resources. What is that going to mean not just for the water companies but for those of us all around the country struggling to deal with the problems of the need for adaptations?

Dr Horton: For the next five years you will not see any obvious impact because, as Pamela said, water resource planning does take a 25-year view.

Q39 Joan Walley: We have got to be planning now for the next five years ahead, have we not?

Dr Horton: Yes, and Ofwat has allowed a notified item for climate change and water resources, so there is the opportunity if companies think it will make a significant difference over the next five-year period for them to make a case to Ofwat within the next five years. So they have left the door open a little bit. I think what we are looking for really is for some consistency and some clear early indication of how climate change is going to be treated, and whilst we might not see any tangible impact for the next five years if we do not see more clarity and consistency from the next AMP forwards we would start to have concerns then because at the moment a lot of the impacts of climate change, as you know, do not really kick in until the 2030s and 2040s and that does give water companies a window on the water resources side to be able to plan for those main impacts of climate change in terms of additional resource or additional demand management.

Ms Taylor: You were looking for examples. One example would be, as I was saying earlier, if you are upgrading your sewage system right now then it would make sense to be allowed to take into account climate change. If you are looking at the resilience of your infrastructure it would make sense to be able to take that into account now. I think perhaps the damage, so-called, would also be in companies feeling when is it that we are able to be sure that if we look longer term that we can now begin to act in terms of what needs to be done now in order to get the split for the future. As I say, I do believe that Ofwat have some extremely good climate change people and I am very hopeful that from now on they will be listening more closely to them.

Q40 Joan Walley: The evidence-based analysis of adaptation, which Ofwat has promised subsequent to the review, does that mean that there is a clear process for that to happen? How will that be funded?

Dr Horton: I think we need to see more details of what the post review adaptation plans of Ofwat are. At the moment I think it is a good idea after the Price Review to take stock, as it is in a number of other areas as well, of what has happened, what companies have put in on climate change investment and what lessons we can learn for the next Price Review. I think that Ofwat's approach of recommending a review after the Price Review is a sensible one, but we need to first take those two months, as Pamela said, to be able to see what the actual implications of the final determination are for companies.

Q41 Mr Caton: Your submission said that controlling water quality at source and improving water efficiency can support both climate change mitigation and adaptation objectives. What can Government and regulators do to help water companies basically do the right things in these areas?

Ms Taylor: What we are looking for and what we certainly believe that we have the responsibility to do as well is to see where you can address adaptation and mitigation and get the benefits for both. So if, for example, you are looking at the way in which we deal with flooding, with flood defences, if we look at the way at the moment we are still continuing to build on floodplains when we should not be, all these kinds of things need to be taken into account because they can help from today and they can help us in the long-term. It is that kind of thing that we want. What we are looking for there is when we already have some of the tools, such as the Water Framework Directive and river basin management plans, where those tools already exist let us begin to use them more wisely; let us use them in a way that not only makes them apply to the water sector, because, my goodness me, we are applying all this because we have an interest on behalf of our customers for making sure that we absolutely get this right. A lot of other people, a lot of other sectors, do not even know yet that they are players and so more needs to be done. I have to say that we had a meeting just recently with the Secretary of State, Hilary Benn, and we were heartened by the fact that particularly when it comes to river basin management plans and so on that he did indeed take the point that more needs to be done in terms of making sure that other sectors, other industries, recognise that they have a part to play as well.

Dr Horton: What we need from regulators and Government is a greater acceptance that you will need some innovative solutions to adapt to climate change. If you look at some of the things that are being trialled in Anglian and other companies at the moment, low technology wastewater treatment systems and so on, that requires a different approach from the regulator because we do have, particularly with the Environment Agency, a very risk-averse approach to water quality and water discharge standards, and that leads us to treat water and waste water to very high standards all of the time. What we really need to look at are things like seasonal consenting, more flexible consenting regimes so that we can meet the same local environmental standards and get the same environmental outcome for the river or the water body, but in a way that is consistent with adaptation to climate change and uses a lot less energy at the same time.

Ms Taylor: That is the crucial thing.

Mr Brown: I was going to add to that. There is an area where we have seen significant movement and that is on the catchment management in this particular planning process. The Drinking Water Inspectorate, the Environment Agency, Natural England and Ofwat have worked with us and many companies across the industry to look at moving away from energy intensive systems of nitrate removal, for example, to look at a catchment-based approach and on protecting raw water quality. That will hopefully reduce carbon emissions but also leaves more water in the environment and better quality water, which is an adaptation issue. So taking that forward over the next five years there is a role to play with some of our regulators in actually getting that to deliver success on the ground.

Ms Taylor: I must say that we are beginning a project now with the Environment Agency which we are really very excited about, which is pretending, if you like, that you have no existing rules, regulations, regulatory regimes at all in the catchment and what would you do if you were starting from scratch? What would you do if you were making everything fit for the future as regards climate change? What kind of regulation would you have? What kind of consenting regime would you have? What would make sense in terms of our carbon impact and so on? We are very pleased that the Environment Agency really does seem up for this and so we are delighted to be working in partnership with them and, true to our word, because we recognise that a partnership needs to be more than two of us, we will be involving many other organisations in this as well.

Q42 Chairman: We are out of time, I am afraid. Thank you very much indeed for coming in, it has been a very helpful session for us.

Ms Taylor: May we thank you and the Committee for taking an interest in this, it is very important to us and we are very pleased that you have. Thank you very much for inviting us.

Memorandum submitted by UK Climate Impacts Programme

Examination of Witness

Witness: Dr Chris West, Director, UK Climate Impacts Programme, gave evidence.

Q43 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to the Committee. Thank you very much for coming in. You have heard what has been said so far, including the fact that we are working to a strict timetable. For a long time the UKCIP was the main government-funded body working on adaptation. We now have a new framework in place for adaptation and Defra has a bigger role. How does that leave you? How do you fit into this new landscape?

Dr West: We always worked at the bottom-up level with stakeholders, with people who really needed to adapt, and we regretted the absence of the top-down imposition of the requirement to adapt. That has now been addressed with the Government's programme. It has made a number of changes to our relationship with our funding department, with Defra; some good, some bad. When we heard about the move of climate change, with the exception of domestic adaptation, across to the new Department of Energy and Climate Change, we were disappointed and said this is splitting up climate change, but actually everywhere where mitigation and adaptation have been considered together, adaptation has always ended up the poor relation and marginalised, so the situation we have within Defra is that it is a very high priority, so in practical terms that is a real advantage. The only cost is that we are more disconnected from that interesting international adaptation agenda, but we have ways of addressing that.

Q44 Chairman: That is interesting. We are conscious as a Committee, having focused on climate change issues for the last four years or so, that this is our first inquiry dedicated specifically and solely to adaptation, so it rather bears out what you have just said. During the lifetime of the UKCIP the scientific evidence has got stronger about the scale and the urgency of the problem. Are you able to react quickly in the light of that evidence about the perhaps slightly changing and growing threat and therefore the need for a bigger and more urgent adaptation programme?

Dr West: I think we have. We have known what evidence is coming along in terms of climate itself. I think we have been able to keep ahead of that. Certainly when the programme started when I joined it seven years ago we spent a lot of time persuading people that this was a real issue, that climate was really changing. Two years ago we made an executive decision that we would not do that ever again. If somebody wanted to talk about whether climate is changing we would say, "We will talk about it in the pub afterwards. We are meeting here to do something about it," and we have had no negative reaction from that decision. In terms of the increasing level of prospective climate change, we are able to deal with that because we have always talked in terms of an adaptive approach. You do not, if you like, adapt to one future; you have to adapt to a range of futures. If that range extends you are still in the same situation.

Q45 Chairman: And this new organisational structure does not inhibit continuing to do that?

Dr West: I do not think so. I think it highlights an issue that is important, that dealing with climate change in terms of adaptation does require both the bottom-up approach and the top-down approach. The focus at the moment is very much on the top-down, requirements of the Act and things like that, and it is easy to forget perhaps that a lot of that is only working because of a lot of work beneath the surface, if you like, ten years or so of UKCIP engaging people and persuading them that this is a real issue and that they ought to start thinking about it for their own purposes. One of the reactions we always got was, "When the Government says we have got to do it, we will do it." That was a very common response from local authorities. I think that bottom-up approach has prepared the ground for the current top-down work. However, that bottom-up detailed technical end of it is still important and I think that is where our role will continue to be.

Q46 Joan Walley: Let us look at that role a little more and let us look at the role of local authorities. If you look at mitigation we have had the Carbon Trust and we have had the Energy Saving Trust and that has had funds come down from government who have provided that bottom-up work. What similar level of support is required for adaptation? Where are those resources and how is this work by local authorities going to be funded?

Dr West: That resource has never come out of government and maybe will never come out of government.

Q47 Joan Walley: Should it?

Dr West: Possibly. I will come back and answer that directly in a moment. The feature of adaptation that we have always used because there is not that big resource is "you will adapt for your own reasons", and local authorities are a nice example of organisations that have a duty of care and they recognise that duty of care for the well-being of the community. That has been our way into local authority taking action on adaptation. They are doing it because they can do that job of looking after the community better by adapting. We have always said yes, this is a necessary extra task but in the long run we believe it will save you time and effort.

Q48 Joan Walley: But just supposing that there was some equivalent of the Carbon Trust, say, to help local authorities to exercise their duty of care. Do you think there is the resource capacity inside local authorities as things stand at the moment to take advantage even if there were that external support or if it was not just coming from a new body that was set up, say from what was already there in departmental spending budgets?

Dr West: Just cash going straight to local authorities would not do it. I think there is a knowledge gap that could be addressed by funding something like ourselves magnified many times and we could engage with every local authority. At the moment we engage with, if you like, those willing to learn about the process and we can pass that on.

Q49 Joan Walley: Is that not the problem that you might have a local authority that is willing and has the capacity but you might get some areas of the country where there is not even an understanding or an acknowledgement of it? Who is going to do that training or where is that going to come from?

Dr West: We can do a small part of it but we cannot do all of it. It has to be driven from those local authorities and some of them are way behind others.

Q50 Mr Caton: You have mentioned that you welcome the new structure in providing a top-down element to complement the work you are already doing bottom-up, but in your written memorandum to us you argue that government departments themselves need to develop a more bottom-up understanding of climate change risks. What sort of steps should large government departments be taking to develop that understanding and what sort of support do they need to provide?

Dr West: I think government departments, civil servants in general and the policy people who tend to pick up this agenda work naturally top-down. They think in generalities, they think in terms of their own policy area perhaps. What we would advise and, where possible, we have advised this, is actually to get down to the coal face where people are solving day-to-day problems because one of the things that is becoming very clear is that we are not talking about an issue that will happen in the future. We have had decades of climate change and we now have what we would call an "adaptation deficit" and drilling down to the operational level to understand how people are now dealing with that adaptation deficit, what things they are facing, how they are solving those issues, is an important part of the richness, if you like, of the risk assessment that government departments are now required to do. I do not believe you can do it top-down. You have to engage, if you like, the people with boots on and ask them what they are experiencing now.

Q51 Dr Turner: You note in your own evidence that Stern set out a very basic principle which most of us recognise in theory which is that investment now yields benefits in due course. You say that that principle is now recognised but somewhat in the abeyance because not a lot of it is actually happening in terms of resource allocations in government. Why do you think this has happened? What do you think is not happening and what do you think are the barriers?

Dr West: There are a number of barriers. You were asking earlier in this session about the Treasury Green Book, which goes some way towards valuing the whole life of a project or an activity. I think they are not going as far as perhaps our Victorian forebears did in investing for a long period in the future. We are required to be much more efficient these days. People are required to show that money is being wisely spent, and if that means you design something for 30 years in the expectation that its value will be zero after that time and you will build something else, then everything is built for today's climate. Where we have engaged people and a lot of effort is to ask, "Is there another way round?" It is always that investment for the far future is the first thing to be cut off any project. People start off with the best of intentions and then somebody says, "We can save five per cent if you do not do that," and they have to do it. I think that Treasury lead is still not strong enough to invest for the far future.

Q52 Dr Turner: So you are saying that short-term priorities will always squeeze out investment in long-term projects?

Dr West: It appears so.

Q53 Dr Turner: That is a little sad, is it not? Have you any levers in your climate change team with which you can attempt to influence resourcing decisions?

Dr West: Yes. Not in terms of finance, I think, but in terms of reputation we can say, "Do you really want to be in a situation where people will look back on your decisions and say 'how short sighted'?" Sometimes that is effective. Sometimes it is the immediate reputational benefit of saying we have sorted this out for 50 years, we are happy that whatever it is is proofed against the worst that climate can throw at it, but it is persuasion, it is a small carrot, it is not a stick.

Q54 Colin Challen: How do businesses respond to the adaptation agenda? Are they prepared for it? Are they really aware? Is it big companies that are maybe doing things or SMEs as well? What is happening on that front?

Dr West: Again this short-termism is a problem but there are companies who recognise there is reputational value in addressing this issue. There is increasing anecdotal evidence that investors recognise that a company that is addressing climate risks adequately might also be addressing other risks rather better than the average, so that is applying. In terms of size of company, the very smallest have real trouble dealing with this. You can talk to them about the very near term, risks they are facing right now, and they can do a few things about that. Sometimes the middle-sized companies will pick this up and say, yes, here is something we can make a profit from or we can avoid real losses. The very big companies, multi-nationals, believe they have got it all sorted, and indeed they may have. It is very hard for us to find out about that level of company. They tend to say we have got very good risk management processes, we have covered this. I have had one or two instances where they have missed the notion entirely. A big multi-national chemical company reduced their emissions of sulphurs, which was hugely trumpeted in their corporate sustainability report, but they had missed the point that most of their plants around the world were sited in flood plains and they had not recognised the link from corporate social responsibility to the possibility that the environment through climate change might have an impact on their profitability.

Q55 Colin Challen: Following on from that, who might actually be studying or auditing the resilience of major plants in this country, which is important to our economy? It might be in private hands but nevertheless it is part of our critical infrastructure.

Dr West: There is a private sector, I guess you would call it, initiative of business continuity, which for companies above a certain size it is effective because they can address it, they can see the reason for it, and issues like flooding are well covered by it. I think a lot of them do not see it in terms of climate change and indeed when I have talked to companies about this, they say, "No, it is much more important to worry about the present than the future." If I then come back and say, "I am talking about the present, you may be running risks right now," they do not see them as climate change related. They say, "It is always like this. This is part of what we do every day."

Q56 Colin Challen: Who is taking the lead for this? Who is helping businesses understand the issues? In mitigation terms we have the Carbon Trust of course. A lot of people understand what a carbon footprint is but on adaptation I am not really clear in my mind who takes the lead on this kind of thing and helps businesses adjust.

Dr West: All right, I think if we look just for comparison to the local authorities, they now have a very strong requirement in National Indicator 188. They have to adapt and they have to report on how they are doing it. For the business sector, there is a lot of pressures each of which is very small and none is in the lead, so we can engage some people, that business continuity agenda engages others. Investors, especially the ethical investors, local authority pension funds, university pension funds, things like that, are interested in the power they might have to put pressure on companies but they are not yet doing it.

Q57 Colin Challen: Is it not an obvious job for the RDAs perhaps?

Dr West: Some of them are picking it up. Some of them have got other things that occupy the front of their minds. There is a whole range of possible pressure points. None of them is really very effective at the moment. We have talked to trade associations picking the ones really that had a history of providing services to their members. We are now talking to the British Standards Institute to see if we can put an adaptation annex on to the ISO 14001 and the other ones. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills are interested but they have a tradition of not legislating. The business sector is difficult because there is a whole raft of small carrots rather than any one big one.

Q58 Colin Challen: Is that because they are lobbying against any intervention and saying they will just take care of it themselves and that self-regulation is always best? That is what they always say.

Dr West: They always have said that. Certainly the CBI is now looking at adaptation. They have an adaptation working group but that will be in terms of providing guidance rather than asking government to legislate, I am sure.

Q59 Dr Turner: Are we going to need more people working in adaptation? Have we got enough people with the right skills to respond to the agenda?

Dr West: Yes, we do need more people. No, we have not got the skills. We have not got the skills in the general population to understand climate risks and therefore a whole area of pressure on government and on utilities to adapt is not there. The public are not requiring this. Everything the Government has done on adaptation has been done without reference to the electorate and I think that is an education issue. Within local authorities, again, the planning process is much more about drawing lines on maps than thinking about risk. I think that is an educational issue. I could talk about schools. I would rather talk about professional training where we are talking to a number of organisations. The Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment are interested in providing professional training for their people. We would like to access some of the local authority specialists, so the planners and the risk managers, but I think there is a big area of - it is not ignorance but it is a way of looking at things slightly differently to the way we do now.

Q60 Dr Turner: The Civil Service has a traditional career development pathway by which people are shuffled around from department to department. Is this compatible with establishing a long-lasting adaptive capability?

Dr West: It makes it harder.

Q61 Dr Turner: Do Defra and other departments have enough people with good understanding of adaptation in positions where they can influence decision-making?

Dr West: I do not think so. I think they are getting there. They have brought in a raft of very smart people who are picking it up. However, despite the number of training days that we have run, the number of people who should be knowledgeable about adaptation but are not is growing.

Q62 Dr Turner: One of the other problems in planning for adaptation is the wide range of probabilities incorporated in climate change scenarios. There is a 50 per cent chance of getting down to two degrees if we do what the Climate Change Committee says but 50 per cent is a pretty big margin of error. What are the implications of this extreme range of probabilities for the robustness of adaptive planning processes?

Dr West: Too big effects. First of all it makes the whole process of looking at the future very much more daunting. It would be nice to be able to say, "This is what the future is going to be", but we are not in that position now and it may well be we do not get any closer to that position. This knowledge of the uncertainty is in fact a disincentive because people say, "Unless you can tell us the future, we cannot adapt to it." I think we can but we have to acknowledge that it is very much more difficult than that simple model would suggest, so we are saying you have to look at this range of futures. You have to look at your own operation and examine your own attitude to risk and then you can look sensibly at this wide range of possible futures and say, "Yes, we can cope with all of these. Up at this extreme end we cannot cope at present and we may have to do something different, but how important is it to us that we do not fail at that extreme?" It does put this extra burden on people to think not only about the climate but about their own operations.

Q63 Dr Turner: Do you see a role for the Met Office in addressing this issue, helping you?

Dr West: The Met Office will do their best to reduce that uncertainty and to describe it, and we can work with the Met Office in helping people understand that description, but, as we learn more about how the climate system itself operates, it is wishful thinking to think that we will reduce the uncertainty about future climate. It may well be that this extra knowledge will actually increase the uncertainty. We are vociferous in saying to people, "Do not sit around waiting for a more exact description of the future; it is not going to happen. You have got to get on and deal with these multiple futures right now. "

Q64 Dr Turner: Are you keeping up-to-date with publishing predictions?

Dr West: Yes, I think we are. I do not like the word "prediction"; I would rather say "projection" because it brings to the fore all the assumptions that lie behind there.

Q65 Dr Turner: I meant projection; I do apologise.

Dr West: I think what we have in the 2009 projections is the best science in the world right now. There are other groups in Australia and the US who are following different paths towards the same thing - a description of that modelling uncertainty. What I think we have in the UK is a very high quality, future proof methodology. It is hard to understand. I fail to understand it myself. You need to understand Monte Carlo modelling and the difference between emulation and simulation. It is complex but we have got an international peer review that says this methodology is robust.

Q66 Chairman: Do you think that the reliability of those projections is important in influencing the doubters? You said earlier on you have given up arguing with doubters, and I know exactly how you feel about that, but nevertheless one way in which doubters may be convinced is if projections are made and they come about, and indeed that is why, sadly, some of the very severe weather recently has been perhaps in some ways helpful in addressing that group of people. The preparation for adaptation and then the confirmation that those preparations were needed may be quite important in getting people to accept tougher mitigation measures. Would you accept that?

Dr West: Yes, I think as a thesis that works. In practice, I think we have to recognise that the adaptation agenda has reached the broadsheet-reading professional decision-makers quite well. The majority of the rest of the population do not believe this is a real issue so why would they worry about adaptation? Increasingly, we have very good evidence of the recent past of places, times, incidents where actually we cannot say that a civilised Western European country has managed its climate adequately. I think that evidence base is very important. It is often not recognised as part of the projections, but the first bit we published was that current climatology.

Q67 Joan Walley: In response to that you are a scientist and you have got evidence-based projections. What do you say to the climate change deniers?

Dr West: I say look at the recent past, look at what has happened and then use the precautionary principle and just address the possibility that this might be a real occurrence. Again, for professional decision-makers that makes sense. If there is a possibility that this is happening, you must deal with it. As the evidence for this being real increases then the argument for dealing with it increases as well.

Q68 Chairman: You are probably right that this is still an issue which is more for the broadsheets than a wider public. Those of us who have taken a close interest in this, in my case since the middle of 1993, can take some satisfaction from the fact that it was not even anywhere near the broadsheet s16 years ago, so very considerable progress has been made.

Dr West: Yes.

Chairman: Thank you very much for coming in. It was very helpful.