As thermometers rocket into the 30s across many parts of Britain, and forecasts predict the hot weather to last well into July, the country desperately needs leaders to rethink climate resilience and adaptation.
The government has announced some ambitious development objectives within the recent Spending Review [SR25], including climate adaptation to ‘increase the UK’s resilience’. The challenge remains how these initiatives will be developed and delivered.
The latest Climate Change Committee [CCC] Progress Report concludes there has been no progress, anywhere. “Partial to insufficient” is where we find our future-readiness. The report paints a picture of a wider, systemic deficit whose impacts manifest across all outcome areas.
While extreme weather events have increased in frequency and intensity, causing significant financial and societal damage to our infrastructure and communities, our political response has been poor, leading to this current state of emergency. If we continue to spend millions on built environment projects that are not climate resilient, we will ultimately find ourselves wasting hundreds of millions on clear-ups and rebuilds.
Where are we stuck?
The CCC document mentions the risk of lock-in – whereby our decisions, investments and developments increasingly entrench dependencies and, thereby, vulnerabilities. It suggests that the way out is to take additional steps in adaptation.
But what if adaptation is exactly where we’re locked-in? Historically, responses to extreme weather have focused on single-purpose engineering solutions or incremental improvements to existing infrastructure. These methods merely adapt an increasingly inadequate system and shape responses to known risks, such as building higher flood barriers, designing sustainable urban drainage solutions, and planting trees to cool microclimates. Crucially, these interventions are designed to minimise or avoid harms we know of but abandon addressing those we do not.
While adaptation interventions may provide a sense of security, it is likely only temporary. Studies show that we will likely exceed our known climate thresholds and that our bodies are more sensitive to heat than we have come to believe. We therefore need to design for more unknown shocks and hazards from climate change.
This is where a move from adaptation to resilience is key, as it challenges us to think more holistically about our own fragility and to consider the capacity of our systems to respond to shocks, resist harm, and recover. The origins of this approach are rooted in ecology, where ecosystems have multiple capacities by which to self-organise in response to change, activating multiple responses – termed response diversity – to maintain or restore their functions.
Multiple vulnerabilities require a systemic approach
To realise that we need to grow our resilience through system-wide changes is to acknowledge our multiple, interconnected vulnerabilities. These include, but are not limited to:
- Physical vulnerabilities – buildings, roads, services and utilities
- Environmental – ecosystem degradation, biodiversity loss, and the instability of critical services and resources we derive from it, like food stability, air and water
- Social – health, wellbeing, culture, housing
- Economic – trade, insurance, mortgages, productivity
- Technological – power, communications, data infrastructure
- Institutional – emergency services, risk management, policies and planning
Our lives and built environments will be destabilised across all these systems, and any policy changes we make from now on need to address and reduce these intersectional conditions. Importantly, climate vulnerability poses dangers to everyone, but its impacts are experienced unevenly, with underserved and marginalised communities most likely to be impacted. This uneven exposure and sensitivity to climate hazards is already entrenching new and existing inequalities that may stem from living, health, economic and social conditions.
Leverage every intervention
Every intervention is an opportunity to apply ‘ecosystem’ thinking, building capacities to understand and enhance our thresholds, cope and recover in times of crisis, adapt systems incrementally, and entirely transform systems through integrated solutions.
In that respect, every intervention is also an opportunity to make new connections, build technical, institutional, and environmental ecosystems through strategic partnerships, and drive overall transformation.
We need government to enable resilience solutions by unlocking mechanisms that allows systems thinking and ecosystem approaches in our cities. If policymakers continue to focus solely on adaptation, they may improve our resilience; however, there is a risk that they may also weaken it. We could find ourselves channelling our resources into projects that will be putting band-aids on broken legs – there is no use in trying to address complex problems with simple fixes.
SR25 has committed £4.2billion over three years to building and maintaining flood defences, for example. The hope is that this is a commitment not just to barriers, but to systemic flood resilience, encompassing the capability of individuals, communities, systems, or infrastructures to resist, absorb, adapt to, and recover from the effects of floods. It involves not only immediate response and recovery, but also long-term strategies to reduce vulnerability and, where possible, deliver transformative change that enhances our regenerative capacity.
Resilience strategies are multifaceted by design, addressing all the parts of a problem – with floods, for example, this might look like improving building standards, developing new emergency tools and protocols, investing in nature-based solutions and working with our natural systems, embracing and harnessing water as a precious resource, identifying co-benefits in our solutions, implementing more sustainable land use practices across all interventions, while developing infrastructure for flood-risk reduction.
Ultimately, resilience measures help to ensure that events do not lead to irreversible damage or prolonged disruption, as well as to facilitate a more rapid and effective recovery response. Though these systemic resilience measures may come at a financial cost, they are vital if we are to avoid a perilous path towards full system adaptation lock-ins.
There is no time like the present for prioritising and developing resilience pathways to address our vulnerabilities.
Dr. Shira de Bourbon Parme is Urban Wellbeing and Innovation Lead at Ramboll.
Image: Raimond Klavins / Unsplash
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