Challenge or opportunity? How to plan for climate change
Climate change is one of the most significant challenges facing the West Midlands. However, people and organisations are often unclear about the nature and scale of the challenges and opportunities, or of the responses and choices that they will have to make.
Our report Challenge or Opportunity? How to plan for Climate Change (pdf, 1.3mb) published in November 2009 aims to help decision makers understand how climate change will impact on them.
The report also aims give practical ways of adapting to, and taking advantage of, the opportunities and challenges presented by climate change.
We were assisted by the West Midlands Climate Change Panel, the West Midlands Climate Change Office and the Environment Group. They guided us on the evidence and themes covered in the report, as well as providing invaluable contributions to the policy debate within the report.
The themes
By viewing climate change from a range of policy perspectives we aim to demonstrate that climate change will impact on all areas of life but that these areas can all contribute to minimising the impact, help adapt to the changing climate and take advantage of the opportunities that arise.
The six themes are:
- The built environment
- Natural resources: water, land use and food
- Transport
- Health
- Energy and waste
- Business, skills and education
The questions asked
To get a clear perspective on the chosen themes we worked with people from those areas who either wrote, or helped the Observatory write, an analysis of the impacts of climate change. Within each chapter there's explanation of:
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What behavioural change authors wish to see within their policy area to achieve policy objectives?
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What impact do they see the challenges and opportunities facing their policy area having on the region's economy?
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What infrastructure do they envisage being developed or required due to the impact of climate change?
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How the challenges and opportunities faced in their policy area vary between urban and rural parts of the West Midlands, if at all?
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What implications do they consider climate change will have on poverty, community cohesion and building resilience?
Shared messages
We identified the following messages consistent across all the policy themes:
- Climate change will bring some very serious challenges but there are already a whole range of opportunities for mitigating against, adapting to and benefiting from, climate change.
- We need to use fewer resources and use those resources that we do use more efficiently.
- By factoring climate change into our planning and investment decisions now, we can minimise the costs of adapting to that change in the future.
- On a consumer level, the use of demand management is an important signal towards the more efficient use of resources.
- There are opportunities ahead:
- Growing market for those businesses operating in the environmental technologies sector.
- New drivers for innovation.
- Opportunity to become self-sufficient in energy supply and reduce costs.
- The West Midlands tourist industry should benefit from warmer weather and the escalating cost of foreign travel, but this needs to be planned sustainably so we do not damage our environment.
- There are two strands to the infrastructure challenge. One is the need for new infrastructure to facilitate adaptation and mitigation of climate change. Second is the ability of large scale infrastructure procurement to drive low carbon development.
Climate change workshop April 2009
The thematic dialogue on climate change began with a workshop on 20th April 2009.
We aimed the workshop at both policy makers and research professionals. The workshop was designed to bring the two groups together to help understand the key issues about climate change in the West Midlands and to understand the areas where further work is required.
The following presentations were given:
More on State of the Region dialogues
The climate change dialogue was completed in 2009.
You can keep up-to-date on developments for current State of the Region dialogues in 2010 via: