We have been working in collaboration with our members the Environment Agency since the start of 2021 on a programme to support, enhance and catalyse action on climate change adaptation in the West Midlands. We have just commenced our third year of work and are delighted to be able to continue where we left off from last year.
In case you missed it, earlier this month we ran a webinar that promoted the adaptation resources that we published last year. Chaired by SWM CEO Anna Bright, the webinar included a summary of our:
- Guide to help small businesses improve their resilience to climate change and other risks.
- Suite of practical case studies on climate change adaptation led by local authorities.
- Latest local authority benchmark exercise.
The webinar was also a call to action. We were delighted that Hugh Ellis, Director of Policy at the Town and Country Planning Association, provided a keynote speech at the event, giving us all food for thought on the importance of climate change adaptation. Our key takeaway from this was that none of us can avoid the climate change impacts that will be happening to us in the coming years. We need to have reasonable worse case scenarios for every city, town and parish and we need a plan for what to do in the face of that scenario. People need to feel that they have some agency to act.
Our Environment Agency colleague, Jim Davies, also spoke about the emerging Local Nature Recovery Strategies, a new England-wide system of spatial strategies for nature required by the Environment Act 2021. This provides a promising and useful mechanism to embed adaptation as a key outcome of nature-based projects, with Jim stating that we need to Adapt to Survive as well as Adapt to Thrive.
As I’ve written about on many prior occasions, we desperately need to give as much attention to climate change adaptation as we do to Net Zero – indeed, one may argue that we need to give more attention to both. We also need to find solutions that intersect both of these agendas. Recent regional, national and global extreme weather events demonstrate that we cannot sit on our hands and do nothing, expecting our global collective action on Net Zero will be enough to halt changes to our climate and the concurrent impacts this will have. This is what our collaboration with the EA is all about. We want to lay the foundations, catalyse and provide the resources that our stakeholders need to integrate adaptation activity into their wider Net Zero and sustainability programmes.
We are, therefore, delighted to be continuing our collaboration with the EA for a third year. This year, there will be strands of work focusing on:
- Adaptation and health, supporting the NHS with their work on adaptation and providing resources and guidance to complement their Green Plans
- Adaptation and agriculture/land management, by producing a version of Weathering the Storm specifically for the farming and land management community, and by convening a summer site visit showcasing good examples of nature-based solutions to adaptation
- Promoting and disseminating the findings and requirements outlined in the forthcoming third National Adaptation Programme, which will be published by Government later in the year
- Continuing our facilitation of the West Midlands Climate Change Adaptation Working Group which brings together cross-sector key players who can help drive forward actions given in the West Midlands Climate Change Adaptation Plan that we published in 2021
- A repeat of the local authority sustainability benchmarking exercise for a third consecutive year, to maintain momentum and keep track of progress.
We want to showcase the art of the possible when it comes to climate change adaptation, inspire and encourage collaboration and nurture ideas that may be otherwise locked away and not celebrated.
Good practice continues to emerge. Our members Stafford Borough Council recently published their climate change adaptation strategy that used the West Midlands version as a framework to inform. We also uncovered a range of nature-based projects as part of our local authority case study suite that we published in December.
I urge all readers of this post who have been part of any project that has, in part, focused on climate change adaptation to get in touch with us; we want to share good practice as far and wide as possible as the requirement to adapt gets more and more urgent with time.
Alan Carr, Senior Sustainability Adviser, on behalf of the SWM Team
