Time for action
As climate shifts worldwide, councils across England are being hit by increasingly extreme weather patterns including violent storm surges, unbearable temperatures and widespread flooding.
Even under the most minimal of warming scenarios, infrastructure, public health, and GDP will all worsen due to the weighty pressure of extreme weather events.
Different areas are undergoing their own unique changes, and specialised adaptation is necessary.
At the level of place, our local authorities are best situated to understand and to act upon individual resilience requirements from city to country to coast.
However, the current funding landscape for local government to deliver resilient places is far too piecemeal and insufficient.
The responsibilities between local, central and industry are also too fragmented and disconnected for this to be addressed as a whole place agenda.
Look no further than the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs’ Committee’s recent report on governance in England and how the central Government’s array arm’s-length bodies such as the Environment Agency, Natural England, the Homes and Communities Agency and Highways England interact opaquely and unaccountably with localities.
Instead, the current set up mostly allows only for short-term planning which engenders an environment of uncertainty where there should only be steady support for mitigation against the climate crisis.
Councils across England have announced a climate emergency, and yet have very little support with which to mitigate this – rendering their pleas mere vapid gesture politics.
While emergency funding has been instigated by central Government, rightfully, for other emergencies such as the Covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis, the local response to the climate emergency seems overshadowed.
Failure to fund whole place resilience is folly.
The prolonged breakdown of infrastructure and the sustained inability of our built environment to withstand extreme weather will cost the nation far more further down the line – perhaps to the point where it will threaten to undermine economic growth and social stability.
Resilience is vital.
It has been predicted that without suitable adaptation measures and mitigation, the country will see extraordinary costs as communities struggle to keep up with the changes forced upon it by climate change.
If action is not taken, the UK might see damages of up to 7.4% reduction of its potential GDP by the end of the century, alongside devastating shocks to its agricultural sector and to the health of its population.
However, with suitable upstream mitigation and preventative measures in place, that figure would drop to a predicted 2.4%.
Certain climate policy initiatives, such as the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan, have already been put into place and can be seen as exemplary in the management of climate challenges.
However, many places will suffer – and indeed are already suffering – without appropriately directed and resourced responses.
Local authorities have the capability to enact necessary resilience measures for both the built and natural environment within planning and land use specifically.
The effective implementation of policy and the preparation of emergency management plans will go far in mitigating the risks from extreme weather events and climate change.
Unfortunately, many lack the wherewithal for such developments.
A good number of local authorities claim they lack the power to make changes, others maintain they lack the skills and knowledge to make a difference, and many more that they lack the resources to implement change.
As central Government grant funding has reduced steadily over the last decade or more, councils have used their own initiative and place potential to plug the gap by generating local income.
While local authorities have been able to create revenue streams from sources such as trading and investments, the new balance of this funding landscape is one that only serves to reduce financial resilience.
In the face of the climate emergency, this lack of resilience is precarious.
The structure of funding for local authorities needs to transform in order that adaptation can take place, and that long-term planning is enabled for the sake of minimising future long-term costs.
To address this, Localis proposes a Local Resilience Act (LRA) that would work to ensure funding for place resilience to meet a statutory duty upon local authorities, as a core service line, to provide the best adaptation measures for the built and natural environments in the coming generations.
The LRA would streamline existing legislation to allow the absolutely necessary changes to happen at the local level – the level where climate change adaptation is most able to mitigate the risks of dangerous weather changes.
Changes to transport, buildings, local businesses, land use and biodiversity are all required and can be enacted by local authorities but only if the role of local government in directing resilience is consolidated and if the necessary funding and revenue streams provided.
To find out more about our LRA campaign and get actively involved, have a look at the Localis website www.localis.org.uk.
Jonathan Werran is chief executive of Localis