The government has been warned: climate adaptation isn’t working

The impacts of this week’s electricity outage in the Iberian peninsula is a timely reminder of the importance of reliable infrastructure to our ability to live as normal. The massive scale disruption – to transport, to business, to the ability to pay for goods or services or stay in touch with friends and family, even to the matches at the Madrid Open tennis tournament – caused by a cascading failure of the power system underlines the precariousness of modern life.  Whatever the cause of this particular incident, the risk of such events is increasing as the climate gets more volatile as temperature rises approach and exceed dangerous thresholds.

Despite that the CCC is damning  ¹⁰ https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/progress-in-adapting-to-climate-change-2025/ on the UK efforts in what has perpetually been a Cinderella area. This is supposed to be an assessment of progress under the third National Adaptation Programme produced in 2023 (NAP3) but in reality it is an exposure of lack of progress:

•    On delivery and implementation: “Adaptation implementation remains inadequate in the UK”;

•    On policies and plans: “Our overall conclusion is that NAP3 is not adequately preparing the country for the effects of climate extremes today or in the future”;

•    On improving the plan: “The UK’s current approach to adaptation policy making is not working. Adaptation is not the cross-government priority that it needs to be, which is holding back delivery.”

The verdict is stark. Successive governments have not taken adaptation seriously enough.

Adaptation has stayed a low priority under Labour

There is little concrete sign that the Labour government is making adaptation significantly more of a priority than its predecessor – though the real test of that will come in the spending review. As the CCC report lays bare, outside road and rail, preparation is lacking. 

The report also calls for better cross-government coordination. At the moment the lead lies with Defra – a legacy of the separation of climate change mitigation and adaptation when the Department of Energy and Climate Change was created in 2008 by Gordon Brown. 

As our report noted last year, there is no obviously better home to lead on adaptation than Defra, but it is unrealistic to expect a third tier department to galvanise cross-government action without support from the prime minister, the Cabinet Office and/or the Treasury. But even areas where Defra leads – such as on the supply or readiness to cope with river or coastal flooding – have worsened since the last CCC assessment, perhaps reflecting the extent to which Defra is stretched by its massive expansion in responsibilities after Brexit. 

But adaptation gets barely a mention in the government’s plan for change, which focusses almost entirely on climate change mitigation and in particular focuses on the goal of clean power by 2030. It remains to be seen how much the Climate Resilience Board, jointly chaired by the Cabinet Office and Defra, can ensure adaptation is a priority. This needs to become a delivery board, overseeing the targets and evaluation that the CCC says is missing. 

Adaptation needs to become a core responsibility for permanent secretaries

But unlike other areas of policy which require cross-departmental collaboration to achieve results, in most cases the adaptation challenge is to ensure that the totality of departmental activity is adequately future proofed. As such, it needs to become part of the normal conduct of government business.  As we have argued before  ¹¹ https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/adapting-climate-change , adaptation needs to be treated as a value for money issue by accounting officers (usually permanent secretaries in charge of departments, and chief executives of arm’s length bodies).  

There is also a really important role to be played by the new National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority  ¹² https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/national-infrastructure-and-service-transformation-authority/about created by the merger of the National Infrastructure Commission and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority.  That should have a critical role in ensuring that new projects take proper account of future climate risks from the start.

That should be a major feature of the ten year Infrastructure strategy due out later this summer.

The CCC has issued a blunt warning. The government should take it seriously.