UK Climate Adaptation Plan ‘Lacks Pace and Ambition’, Independent Assessment Reveals

Once a leader in climate adaptation, the UK now faces lock-in to additional climate risks and wide-ranging impacts affecting all levels of society, the national Climate Change Committee has said.

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The current climate adaptation plan for the UK “falls short of what is needed” to prevent an adequate response to far-reaching climate risks, a new preliminary assessment has found.

The third and latest National Adaptation Plan (NAP3), published in July 2023, “lacks sufficient scale and ambition” and “offers little in terms of significant new commitments” to support the much-needed delivery of large-scale adaptation action across the nation, the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) said on Wednesday. 

Under the 2008 Climate Change Act, the UK is required to produce a NAP every five years, the progress of which is assessed by the CCC every two years.

In March 2023, ahead of the plan’s publication, the Committee warned that the UK was “strikingly unprepared” and had “little time left” to protect its people and ecosystems, urging the government to develop a “more ambitious” adaptation plan and “lead to a long overdue shift in focus towards the delivery of effective adaptation.”

Despite being the “most developed and comprehensive” of the three NAPs, the current plan is still severely underfunded, poorly coordinated across different governmental departments, and it lacks monitoring and evaluation – all key factors to drive adequate delivery of adaptation strategies, according to the CCC. The assessment also found that most of NAP3 is based on existing policies and mechanisms, which do not reflect the urgent climate challenges and risks the country is facing.

2023 was the world’s warmest and the UK’s second-warmest year on record, with mean temperature in the country standing at 9.97C, just below the 2022 figure of 10.03C but ahead of the now third-warmest year, 2014, which saw an average temperature of 9.88C. 

Eight of the 12 months last year were warmer than average – with June marking the hottest June ever recorded in the country “by a wide margin,” according to the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service. And the trend is continuing. Last month was the warmest February on record for England and Wales and the fourth-wettest for the country.

“The evidence of the damage from climate change has never been clearer, but the UK’s current approach to adaptation is not working,” said Julia King, also known as Baroness Brown of Cambridge, chair of the adaptation committee.

The CCC assessment includes recommendations for the new government, which is set to be elected no later than 28 January 2025. 

According to the Committee, the UK, up until recently regarded as a leader in its approach to climate adaptation, should learn from countries like Germany, Canada, and the US, all of which have made significant strides in the climate change fight in recent years. The assessment cites these countries’ adaptation strategies as exemplary as they satisfy all three requirements for a high-ambition NAP: coherent, specific, and measurable goals and outcomes, constantly updated commitments that reflect the rapidly changing climate, and effective cross-government governance structures to engage all departments and guarantee delivery at all levels of society.

In the assessment, the CCC also urges the new government to integrate the outcomes of the new framework for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) agreed upon at the most recent international climate change negotiations, COP28, particularly regarding protecting natural systems and biodiversity. It comes after a report published in September 2023 warned that one in six species in the UK is at risk of being lost.

More on the topic: Assessing the Progress on the Implementation of the Global Goal on Adaptation

This is not the first time the UK’s climate strategy faces backlash. In July 2022, a London judge ruled that the country’s net-zero plan was in breach of the law as it provided insufficient details on how the climate targets will be met, and ordered the government to outline a more detailed plan on how it plans to reach carbon neutrality.

Environmental groups Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth, and the Good Law Project also repeatedly took legal action over the government’s flagship climate strategy, claiming that it had legally failed to include clear guidelines and policies to deliver its emission reduction promises.