GovWire

Introduction: the story so far

Climate change is real and it isnt to be taken lightly: on the contrary, its the biggest threat there is. But its often talked about in the same way in the same (rather techie) words, which can cause peoples attention (including mine) to drift off elsewhere. So today I want to tell you about climate in a different way, by using a fairy story - Cinderella - as an analogy. To be honest Im not sure this really works, because as youll see it requires a fairly tortuous use of the story. But despite or maybe even because of that, I hope you will remember the message.

Cinderella is not a real person. But lets start with someone who is, the UN Secretary General. We are on the highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator. Those are his words at COP27 a couple of weeks ago. Not too cheery I know, but dont worry, Im going to get the positive bit in a minute.

First though I wanted to point out that many people are already living in climate hell. In the past two decades, climate-related disasters have nearly doubled compared to the preceding 20 years. They have killed thousands of people and forced hundreds of millions to flee their homes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now estimates that nearly half of humanity is living in a climate-related danger zone. And its not just us humans the species that caused climate change - who are in danger. More than 1 million other species are at risk of extinction.

And this isnt just an issue for other people in faraway countries. 4,000 heat-related deaths have been recorded in England since 2018, drought has threatened our water supply this year (and continues to threaten it next summer if we dont get good rainfall throughout the winter), sea level rise and coastal erosion are putting many British communities at serious risk, and flood events previously predicted to happen once a century are now nearly annual occurrences.

Im not telling you all this to shock you into a state of helpless paralysis. In fact, despite everything I have just said, I am a climate optimist. Let me explain why.

Why the story can have a happy ending

I am a climate optimist because its clear that this story can have a happy ending. Tackling the climate emergency is not rocket science. We know what the problem is: greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are warming the planet, changing the climate and producing higher seas and more extreme weather. And we know what the solution is: we need to stop the emissions of the gases that are changing the climate (for which the technical term is mitigation) and we need to reshape our places, our infrastructure, our economy and our lifestyles so we can live safely and well in a climate-changed world (for which the technical term is adaptation). So the good news is that we know what we need to do. We just need to do it.

Writing a good story: mitigation and Prince Charming

And in many respects, we are starting to do it.

We have begun to make substantial progress on the first side of the climate coin: mitigation. That is happening at international, national and individual level.

We are seeing the global cooperation we need to tackle what is quintessentially a global problem, through the UN COP process, under which all countries are committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and to trying to keep global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Is that process perfect? No. Is it going as far and as fast as we would all like? No. But is it essential and is it making progress on reducing the causes of climate change? Yes and yes.

We are seeing many countries take action at national level to bring down their carbon emissions. The UK deserves credit for its own leadership here. In 2019 the UK became the first major economy in the world to legislate to reach net zero emissions by 2050. And since then we have cut our emissions by more than any other G20 country. That didnt happen by accident. Planning, innovation, policies, prioritisation and resourcing the right things at the right time, actions that are being driven by many of you in the room today, have made securing a net zero future look both attainable and attractive, which is why many other countries are now doing what the UK is doing.

The Environment Agency plays a big part in helping mitigate the UKs climate impact. We:

• regulate the carbon and other emissions of most industries, businesses and farms in this country. Since 2010 we have cut the emissions of greenhouse gases from the sites we regulate by 50%.

• administer the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, which caps and will over time further reduce the emissions of heavy industry, aviation and other significant producers of greenhouse gases.

• are walking the walk ourselves with our own commitment to make the Environment Agency and our whole supply chain a Net Zero emitter by 2030.

So the mitigation side of tackling the climate emergency is getting a lot of attention and airtime. Getting to Net Zero is popular with most people. It is something that almost everybody knows about. You could say that mitigation is the Prince Charming of the climate emergency.

Where we need a different story: adaptation

But there is a Cinderella in this story too: adaptation.

Even if we stopped all emissions of greenhouse gases tonight, those that have occurred over the last two hundred or so years since the Industrial Revolution mean that the climate will still continue to change. Which is why the other side of the climate coin adaptation to make us more resilient in a climate changed world is just as important as the mitigation which Net Zero provides. And here the story is less good.

While the 2015 Paris COP established a Global Goal on Adaptation, progress has been slow. And the complexity of articulating, measuring and implementing good adaptation means it has been largely ignored in favour of focussing on the easier to understand and measure mitigation targets. Which is one reason why in 2020 only about a third (36%) of global climate projects were related to adaptation. And why the UK Committee on Climate Change described adaptation as The Cinderella of climate change, still sitting in rags by the stove: under-resourced, underfunded and often ignored. And that has consequences.

Parliaments Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy has said that the UK has so far largely failed to adapt much of its critical infrastructure to the climate emergency, threatening the countrys security and prosperity. Unless we can start closing the widening gap between adaptation action and worsening climate risk, various ugly sisters will rear their heads. We will see significant and growing threats to our habitats, our soil health, our crops, our power systems, our physical and mental health, and our economy.

And the longer we leave it to adapt, the bigger the bill we are handing to our children. Because it will be them who are forced to pay for the deterioration of our climate-vulnerable infrastructure and the disruptive consequences of climate impacts. Today flooding causes 670m worth of damage every year to non-residential properties across the UK. Unless we take further action to adapt, under a very plausible 2C by 2100 warming scenario, those damages will be 27% higher by 2050 and 40% higher by 2080. This is not what the next generation need on top of the rising cost of living.

Writing a new and better chapter: adaptation and resilience

Luckily, Cinders may get to go to the ball after all, because a new chapter is in sight one in which we do put as much emphasis on adaptation and resilience as we do on mitigation.

Last years COP26 in Glasgow started the process of transforming the Global Goal on Adaption into concrete actions. The agreement at the recent COP27 in Egypt on a new funding arrangement for loss and damage will help those countries most affected by climate disasters. And the COP27 negotiations prompted new commitments from the rich world to help, including from the UK which pledged to triple its international funding for climate adaptation.

Meanwhile here in the UK the government is gearing up to publish its third five-year National Adaptation Programme next year. This will set out the actions that the government and others will take to adapt to the challenges of climate change in England from 2024 to 2029, and theres widespread agreement that it needs to be the most ambitious yet.

My hope is that the people in this room and others in government and the wider public sector will help shape and deliver that plan because, done right, it will benefit all of us. No Whitehall department, no public sector organisation and no private sector business is immune to the climate challenge: we all conduct activities or deliver services that need to be climate resilient, we all have or depend on assets and systems which need to withstand climate impacts, and we all have a duty to help protect the people we serve from the natural disasters and other consequences of a climate changed world.

The UK government has a leading role to play in this, and it is playing it. But in one sense governments, here and elsewhere, can only be the fairy godmother of climate adaption, because while governments can change some things, including by giving political leadership, setting standards and

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