A house in flood water in Ironbridge, Shropshire, in 2019. Photo:AFP
By Patryk Krych | The World Daily | JUNE 16th 2021
According to the UK government’s official climate advisors, the country’s government is failing to provide sufficient protections against climate dangers that may lead to the endangerment of people through rising heatwaves and blackout risks.
Failing to tackle the issues of heatwaves and power blackouts is “absolutely illogical,” according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC). The committee added that thus far, England has been slow to keep up with the impacts of global warming – the majority of which are only growing worse by the day, and causing harm across the nation.
Experts at the CCC claim to be growing frustrated by the government’s lack of pace in terms of keeping up with the global crisis, with even the UK government’s environmental adviser having accused the country’s ministers of not planning for the “inevitable” climate impacts.
“We’ve been raising our concerns consistently for some time now. [The government has] found it far too easy to dismiss those,” said chief executive of the CCC, Chris Stark. “We need a better plan from government.”
He added that any environmental strategies that the government intends to form must put emission cuts into consideration, as well as accounting for “the changes in climate that we know we’re going to see.”
In the UK alone, 2,500 people had died as a result of the heatwave in 2020. The CCC had warned the UK government for at least a decade that homes needed to be made much easier to cool, with the inevitably worsening heatwaves that would come to grip the country.
“Adaptation remains the Cinderella of climate change, still sitting in rags by the stove: under-resourced, underfunded and often ignored,” said the chair of the CCC’s adaptation committee, Baroness Brown. “Not only is it essential that we do adaptation, but it also provides economic benefit. So it’s absolutely illogical that we are not doing it.”
A large part of the CCC’s recent frustrations had revolved around the fact that acting sooner than later to adapt to the changing climates will be 10 times as cost-efficient as not bothering to adapt at all. Despite this, not enough has been done on the UK’s part.
“Our particular frustration is that after the last climate-change risk assessment in 2016, the adaptation plan that was published was really inadequate,” Brown added. “It didn’t address many of the risks highlighted and it wasn’t in any way action focused. A detailed, effective action plan that prepares the UK for climate change is now essential and needed urgently.”
